This commit is based on the following design document:
https://mdg.hackpad.com/Creating-and-Updating-Docs-0ZyyDcSZDxp,
and some other stuff from here: https://mdg.hackpad.com/Meteor-Long-Description-wGZ1vIOwVlF
and was code reviewed here: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/3375
It does the following:
- Allow the user to specify package documentation in Package.Describe.
We will take the README.md file by default, to make the transition easier.
Users can specify ‘documentation: null’ to not submit a README.md
- From that documentation, extract the section between the first and second header
to use as the long form description for the package.
- Upload the documentation to the server at publish-time. Allow metadata changes with ‘publish —update’.
- Change the default package skeleton to include the README.md file.
Also, changes the skeleton to have fewer useless placeholders in Package.describe values.
- Fix a minor bug where Git did not show up when running ‘meteor show’ on local packages.
A note on ‘documentation: null’ and blank documentation — we don’t let maintainers upload
blank README.md files, because we want to encourage people to fill them out. (Instead,
we allow a ‘documentation: null’ as an override) This is a UX issue! It is not a technical thing.
There is more discussion and code review in: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/3375
The ‘show’ command has been completely rewritten. It has different output
and now does the following:
- Interacts with local package versions. Checks in the local package catalog, and
returns the local versions along with the server versions. When ‘meteor show’ is
run with a specific version request (‘meteor show foo@<version>’), default to
showing the local package version (but show a message that a server version is
available). Running ‘meteor show foo@local’ will always show the local version
(useful for version-less local packages).
- Simplify the interface. Instead of various ‘show-*’ flags, we only have one: show-all.
By default, we only show the top 5 official (non-prerelease) unmigrated versions of a
package (+ local version, if applicable). This can be overridden with ‘show-all’, and we
let the user know that more versions are available. For releases, ‘show-all’ will show
non-recommended releases.
- Display publication time for non-local package versions. This makes it easier to run
‘meteor show <name>’ and see if <name> is actively maintained. For local packages,
we display the root directory (useful for large apps or running with the
LOCAL_PACKAGE_DIRS variable, for example).
- For non-local package versions, show if the version is ‘installed’ (downloaded into the
warehouse). This involved minor changes to tropohouse.js. The idea is that this should
give a pretty good clue whether the version can be added offline.
- Show version dependencies. This should help the user understand, track down and
debug constraint solver failures.
- Do not show version architectures except in —ejson mode.
- Allow an ‘—ejson’ flag to get the output in EJSON format. That should make scripting
easier. (As a bonus, for release versions, the EJSON output acts as a nice template
for the release configuration file.)
The search command now does the following:
- Interacts with local package versions. Specifically, local versions override equivalent
server versions. Also, ‘search’ works on local packages (so, for example,
‘meteor search troposphere’ inside the package server app will give you the troposphere
package).
- Allows an ‘—ejson’ flag to get the outout in EJSON format.
Minor changes to some minor testing infrastructure:
- A new skeleton package, package-for-show. Its versions contain different
values for various metadata, so we can test that metadata comes from
the right version.
- In several places, replace the pattern of copying around
package.js files with using the replace function on a placeholder
string. (Mostly, as applied to package versions).
This is based on these hackpads: https://mdg.hackpad.com/Showing-Package-Metadata-HdGo3Lzx3hR
and https://mdg.hackpad.com/Meteor-Search-Output-1xxEzrAK9YU.
Includes the following changes to Console.js:
- Console.info, Console.warn, Console.debug and Console.error now automatically
line-wrap the output to 80 characters, or the width of the terminal screen (if
known). This is in line with our current style guide on how things should be wrapped!
- Sometimes, there are parts of text that we don't want to line-wrap. For example, if we are
telling the user to run 'meteor long-command --with --options' we don't want to
have a newline in the middle of that! Wrap those commands in Console.command, like
this:
Console.info("something and then run", Console.command(command), "and then");
This also makes them bold if chalk is on, as a nice bonus. So, if we ever turn
chalk back on, the bolding of commands will be more consistent.
- Sometimes, there is bulkier output that we don't want to format at all, including
line-wrapping: log snippets, stack traces, JSON output, etc. In that case, we can use
Console.rawInfo, Console.rawError, Console.rawWarn and Console.rawDebug. Don't use
Console.command inside the raw* functions! It won't be processed (at all).
- There are fancier things that we can do, other than just simply wrapping things.
We can indent:
" Start here and then when wrapping
continue over here".
We frequently do this for commands, for example. In the past, we did this manually --
but we can't do this for long messages that might get wrapped, and anyway, it is
good to codify this instead of counting spaces. Allows us to be better about consistency,
for example.
- We can also add a bulletPoint, which is a small notice in the beginning that looks like
this:
" => Start here and then when wrapping
continue below the bulletPoint".
Since it is a elss intuitive option, I have wrapped most of the time that we use a
bulletPoint into helper functions on the Console.js.
- Some common bulletpoints that we use are:
ASCII Checkboxes (Console.success)
ASCII X-s (Console.failWarn and Console.failInfo)
=> (Console.arrowError, Console.arrowWarn, Console.arrowInfo)
WARNING (Console.labelWarn)
The => are sometimes indented, so they take an optional indent argument, showing how
many spaces to indent by.
The wrapper interface would be less complicated, if there was a more unified conceit behind our
terminal messages. If there is one, it is not documented. My hope is that, in many cases,
moving these to Console will make it easier for someone with great product sense to
clean up our terminal messages. It will also make it easier to write such messages, since
it will be easier to follow an accepted standard.
In the codebase outside of Console:
- Went through and looked at our use of Console.error/info/etc, replacing with rawError/etc
whenever approporiate.
- Went through and modified most of 'stdout' and 'stderr' calls to use the new functions.
I made an exception for stuff that doesn't want a new line at the end, or otherwise does
weird things (ex: print user logs directly), on the basis that, at this juncture, it is
better to be safe than to be sorry.
- Long messages no longer need to break the code style guide by ignoring indentation rules.
Fixed that where approporiate.
- Fixed the tests! A number of our stock messages are actually longer than 80 chars.
- Personal favourite: The Android license agreement is now line wrapped! Much better experience.
- There is some more work to do on:
- longform help (currently comes with built-in linebreaks, would have to change the entire
mechanism for how that works)
- Buildmessage sometimes has headers that start with =>, but they are short. I didn't want to
pass wrapper options all the way to main.captureOrExit before merging the rest of this and
making sure that we like it. Since these messages are fairly short, I don't think that's
likely to be a serious problem.
I hope that this makes life easier for us in the future! No more counting chars, no more breaking
the style guide. Better experience for users with wider terminals (or even shorter terminals!).
Let's give this a try.
