Svgo: Separate CLI?

Created on 6 Oct 2015 · 16Comments · Source: svg/svgo

SVGO has a lot of dependents - it would be nice to extract the CLI into a separate module so that consumers of the JS API don't have to download coa, mkdirp et al. :smile:

Source

ben-eb

👍1

All 16 comments

:+1:

TrySound on 6 Oct 2015

Can you provide an example of such a package? How to provide CLI in such a way?

GreLI on 7 Oct 2015

https://github.com/ben-eb/cssnano-cli
https://github.com/ai/autoprefixer-cli
https://github.com/code42day/postcss-cli

TrySound on 7 Oct 2015

Essentially it means removing the binary and associated dependencies/code from this module, out to a new module, say svgo-cli. Then svgo-cli would depend on svgo, and be its own package with its own tests etc.

https://github.com/ben-eb/cssnano/commit/8f4db2268e57c2adfddbfd21420e5d0943342c8f

ben-eb on 7 Oct 2015

@GreLI Any thoughts?

TrySound on 23 Oct 2015

That's a major change, and I'm not sure, that it really worth it.

GreLI on 23 Oct 2015

@GreLI You can firstly just make svgo-cli which will be dependent on svgo. Dependencies will be deduped.

TrySound on 23 Oct 2015

Why do you think that dependendecies are such a big problem? Perhaps, svgo will reutilize them in the future :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:.
Besides, users are got used to just do npm install svgo and I don't think that breaking this pattern is a good idea either.

GreLI on 23 Oct 2015

After reading @sindresorhus' reasoning on this (https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama/issues/17#issuecomment-117860283) I thought it was a good practice to have a separate CLI. It makes sense for those wrapper modules that will not make use of the command line, and therefore don't need the dependencies. This way the package is leaner overall. :smile:

The why is simple; extra calls to npm & more to download means slower build times. Less is more.

ben-eb on 23 Oct 2015

:+1: In addition, it makes the readmes neater, as you don't have to fit both CLI and API docs into one readme.