Wasm-pack: should we -f wasm-bindgen install?

[ashleygwilliams]

pros:

• will fix most bug reports we've received thus far on this (the bug is that wasm-bindgen is a later version)

cons:

• will install wasm-bindgen even if it's already installed, so it will take longer

my desired behavior here would be similar to using the npm install @latest tag, which checks if the current installed version is the same as the version tag latest, if not installs, if so does nothing. i don't think cargo has this yet but perhaps i should write an rfc for it. i imagine we could write some logic to do this ourselves as well.

[mgattozzi]

I wanted to see if there was a way to see if we can see a discrepency in versions somehow there is:

michael@eva-01 ~ % cargo install wasm-bindgen-cli
    Updating registry `https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index`
 Downloading wasm-bindgen-cli v0.2.6
  Installing wasm-bindgen-cli v0.2.6
error: binary `wasm-bindgen` already exists in destination as part of `wasm-bindgen-cli v0.2.4`
binary `wasm2es6js` already exists in destination as part of `wasm-bindgen-cli v0.2.4`
Add --force to overwrite

Now the solution to "Should we add -f" will be to parse this output and compare semver, possibly with a crate of some sort. Not gonna lie this is ugly and something we'll need to invoke on every call but it's better than nothing. If we go forward with this we should tell the user they'll always need to use the latest version, possibly warning them in the process of doing so.

[alexcrichton]

FWIW I definitely feel like Cargo should have a feature for this. In the meantime I'd recommend keeping up to date with the latest wasm-bindgen version if possible, even just tonight the latest Rust nightly broke wasm-bindgen and I had to publish a fix.

Hopefully soon everything will be stable and breakage will be a thing of the past!

[mgattozzi]

@alexcrichton Ashley and I were talking, probably going to write up an RFC for this so you can do something like cargo install wasm-bindgen-cli@latest or something like that. In the meantime I'm going to start a cargo subcommand proof of concept that works with crates.io api to make it nicer

[alexcrichton]

Sounds great!

[Pauan]

A dedicated command would be nice, but wouldn't cargo install wasm-bindgen && cargo update --package wasm-bindgen be good enough?

(It would probably have to be run as two commands, and errors from the first command ignored, but...)

[mgattozzi]

michael@eva-01 ~ % cargo update --package wasm-pack-cli
error: could not find `Cargo.toml` in `/home/michael` or any parent directory

Nope doesn't work for CLI tools :(

[steveklabnik]

FWIW I have always found @latest to be massively confusing, but also very much agree that something should be done here.

[Pauan]

@mgattozzi Ah, that's a real shame. I guess it'll require changes to cargo then.

[itsybitesyspider]

I feel like the developer experience will be much improved if I can lock wasm-pack and wasm-bindgen to a specific known-working version. Updates break things, and I'm not sure that simply having wasm-bindgen installed at all is something I really need help with from wasm-pack. I'm able to lock everything else in my development environment (including rust nightly).

It's too bad cargo (AFAIK) can't install binaries per-project like npm does.

[steveklabnik]

Could wasm-bindgen export a library and then wasm-pack could use that instead? Then it’d be easier to lock, and no install needed.

[alexcrichton]

FWIW there's a wasm-bindgen-cli-support crate on crates.io which is the library that wasm-bindgen-the-CLI uses. That being said I'm not currently maintaining it for semver compatibility, so I wouldn't recommend using it right now. If that's the chosen option to go here, though, I'd be more than willing to put some effort into cleaning it up and providing semver stability guarantees!

[data-pup]

This issue was brought up in #81, so I figured I'd pop in to say if there's anything that I can do to help with the cleaning up the wasm-bindgen-cli-support crate, let me know! I'd love to help out :)

[mgattozzi]

So I was discussing this with @ashleygwilliams and it looks like the cargo-update tool has it's internal library available and the binaries for cargo-update use that. Essentially we just need to use that to check local versions compare it with the one on crates.io and go from there. I'll get started on this, but it'll let us avoid force installing unless there's a newer version. I think this is a great start.