[Discussion] Absolute vs relative paths

[radex]

Currently, most imports in 🍉 are absolute (i.e. import from 'Query'). This is mostly an artifact of the fact that it was extracted from a codebase of an app. But it's also very convenient when working on Watermelon.

But it adds A LOT of complexity, because every tool that has to understand the codebase has to be (often separately) configured:

• Babel (for building) - [Discussion] Better dist format #22
• Jest
• Eslint (via eslint-babel)
• Flow
• Metro (for integration tests)
• the app and Jest in an app importing Watermelon (we use Babel to rewrite for dist)
• Flow in the app importing Watermelon (also using Babel but have to write a separate copy with Flow annotations — which has its own problems… - see [Discussion] Better Flow setup #21 )

I see 3 options:

1. We keep the current setup (This is a big PITA)
2. We give up and just change the absolute paths to relative paths.
3. We meet halfway and change all paths to something like ~/blah or src/blah. I think it's not much better than 1. We still have to configure the same number of tools, it's just that there's one item in the config.

Personally I think it's easiest to go with (2). It's a little less convenient when refactoring, but I think overall a smaller maintenance burden. But I don't have experience with shipping NPM packages, and I don't know what other larger JS libraries do.

[satya164]

Facebook uses this kind of module system, haste? IMO relative paths are better, no confusion about where the module is, no configuration needed for tools etc.

[radex]

Facebook uses this kind of module system, haste?

Yeah, but haste is not exactly absolute paths, I think it searches the whole tree to find the right package. And haste is specific to Facebook tools, isn't universal