Should we merge ros3djs, ros2djs, and roslibjs into a monorepo?

[EzraBrooks]

These libraries are pretty old, so I suspect these packages were split in an effort to reduce minified bundle size - i.e. the previous recommended way to use roslibjs via a CDN.

However, now:

• The cross-package dependencies between the three are causing problems (i.e. TF2Client ROS2 compatibility in ros3djs)
• The great majority of applications in the wild use bundlers that can tree-shake out code that you're not using
• Computers, browsers, HTTP, and the internet are way faster, and slightly larger bundle sizes in favor of a more coherent API and maintenance surface may be preferable.

I think we should merge all three into one singular package.

@MatthijsBurgh @sea-bass @bjsowa what do you think?

[EzraBrooks]

There's also the possibility of an in-between solution where we merge the repositories but keep them as separate packages using something like pnpm workspaces.

[EzraBrooks]

The more I think about it, the more I think this makes sense regardless of whether we end up merging them into one big package - putting them as-is, as multiple packages, into a workspace-based monorepo would be a good incremental step towards merging them.

[EzraBrooks]

Opened a draft PR to do this at #1030, but I think we should release 2.0 before we do this (because moving files around isn't an API break, and right now people are able to install roslibjs from a git URL to not wait for 2.0, which this would make more difficult).

[EzraBrooks]

I spoke with @MatthijsBurgh and he agrees this would be a good improvement, so since at least three of us are now on the same page I'm going to close this discussion and open an implementation issue.

[bjsowa]

I don't personally use these libraries (as of yet) but I don't see a problem with increasing the bundle size if it could help with maintaining the projects.

[EzraBrooks]

If we do this I think it's extremely important to maintain the Git history so we keep that 15 years of valuable context. I'm plenty familiar with turning multiple repos into a monorepo via git subtree, but when there's GitHub issue and PR references involved it's a bit tricky to maintain backlinks. @eholum did you have a trick for that? I think I remember you figuring out how to rewrite all the references in a Space ROS repo migration.

[eholum]

I don't want to say that this is the worst thing I've ever done, but there is an unholy way to rewrite all history to merge unrelated repos together, while updating commit messages to handle issue locations. I left it in: space-ros/space-ros#167