Commits on Jan 25, 2021

1. Revive zen-observable-ts wrapper. …

   Apollo Client currently uses the Observable implementation provided by the
   zen-observable npm package, since it is small and works well for our
   needs. Although zen-observable itself is not written in TypeScript, we
   use the companion package @types/zen-observable to provide types.
   
   We are actively considering switching from zen-observable to RxJS (#5749),
   though it remains to be seen how much of a breaking change that will be
   (and thus whether it makes sense for a minor or major version update).
   
   In the meantime, several issues (most recently #5961) have been opened
   pointing out that zen-observable effectively does not support importing
   its code as ECMAScript modules, even though it has a separate entry point
   (zen-observable/esm.js) that uses ESM syntax.
   
   This is a problem the zen-observable package could easily fix by adding a
   "module" field to its package.json, but @abdonrd tried to propose that
   change in a PR (as I requested), and has not heard back since June 2020:
   zenparsing/zen-observable#74
   
   Fortunately, Apollo maintains an npm package called zen-observable-ts,
   which was originally created to provide TypeScript types, before
   @types/zen-observable was introduced. This commit revives that wrapper
   package, so we can make sure both CommonJS and ESM exports are supported,
   with full TypeScript types, until the zen-observable maintainer gets
   around to merging that PR.
   
   I considered forking zen-observable, but I'm happy with this wrapping
   strategy, since reusing zen-observable makes it easier to take advantage
   of any future updates to the zen-observable package.
   
   I also considered using https://www.npmjs.com/package/patch-package to
   apply changes to node_modules/zen-observable/package.json upon
   installation, but that doesn't really work unless @apollo/client bundles
   the zen-observable implementation into itself, since otherwise the
   original (unpatched) zen-observable package will continue to be installed
   when developers npm install @apollo/client. The patch-package tool is
   great, but I don't think it's meant for libraries to use.
   
   Thankfully, this time around we do not need to hand-write the TypeScript
   types, since they can be re-exported from @types/zen-observable.
   
   I bumped the major version of zen-observable-ts, since the older versions
   (used by apollo-link) still get more than two million downloads per week.
   
   The source code for the zen-observable-ts package can now be found at
   https://github.com/apollographql/zen-observable-ts, rather than the old
   https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-link monorepo.

   

   benjamn committed Jan 25, 2021
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