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MfGames Writing Upkeep

Up a Level

As usual between major projects, I try to spend a little time working on maintenance and upkeep of the multitude of projects that I've written or contributed too. It is somewhat random, but I had a task to move two of my Node packages, @mfgames-writing/ncx[1] and @mfgames-writing/opf[2] into the mfgames-writing monorepo[3] when I had done the rest of the projects.

1: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mfgames-writing/ncx

2: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mfgames-writing/opf

3: https://gitlab.com/mfgames-writing/mfgames-writing-js

The decision to convert to a single repository for a multiple of projects took me quite a while. Mostly it came from the problem I have with package-based arrangements, the “rail car”. When I have to make a change to a library but that change has to be propagated through a number of packages until the one that needed the change. It looks like a chain and it's tedious when I'm doing rapid sets of changes trying to figure something out.

Now, I could just do everything in a single monolithic project, basically have a `mfgames-writing` package that does everything, but I still follow the Unix Philosophy: Do One Thing Well. The individual packages handle EPUB, PDF, and HTML generation. It feels “wrong” to force all of them to be combined together.

In the end, I want separate packages but I dislike the process of working with them. With Node packages, I found Lerna[4] which handles a lot of that forwarding, plus plays well with semantic-release[5] and conventional commits[6]. I've been happy, but it was a learning process and I missed two packages.

4: https://lerna.js.org/

5: https://semantic-release.gitbook.io/semantic-release/

6: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/

I also reformatting the code and switched testing over to Jest. It bumped up a few versions, but that always seem to happen when I'm learning things.

While that cleans up most of the packages, there are a few others related packages I still need to convert, namely the Docker image[7] and the Yoman generator[8]. Those are completely different than the core packages, so they shouldn't be in the monorepo in my opinion.

7: https://hub.docker.com/r/dmoonfire/mfgames-writing-js/

8: https://www.npmjs.com/package/generator-mfgames-writing

But those can wait until next around.