ADR 1: Restructure per-project dependencies

Status

Accepted

Context

Currently, for a per-project installation, all dependencies are installed to the ./.basalt directory. The way transitive dependencies are installed create some issues. For example, if B is a dependency of A, it will be installed in the ./.basalt directory of package A. This creates a deep hierarchy (early versions of npm ran into this)

Decision

When installing dependencies for a per-project installation, all dependencies should be hoisted to the top level ./.basalt directory, or to the ./.basalt directory. To prevent version conflicts, version numbers are appended to the package when downloading and extracting. For example, if package-b@v0.1.0 is a dependency of package-a@v0.8.0, it will be installed to the ./.basalt/transitive directory. More details can be found in Package Installation

Consequences

Negatives

Current users of basalt will have to completely remove their previous .basalt directory, and reinstall packages. Since the main ./.basalt/bin, ./.basalt/completions, and ./.basalt/man directories are not changing, code changes within packages are unnecessary

Positives

• More maintainable and less buggy code
• Potentially decrease the total disk space of .basalt
• Easier to introspect source code of packages