Make develop build and run using normal npm conventions

[ara4n]

Rather than messing with fetch-develop.deps.sh / mandating manual linked checkouts, or having to run three separate npm run start processes, it would be much more simpler if riot-web just let you npm run build or npm run start on develop to pull in the right versions of react-sdk and js-sdk as per package.json. Users could then npm link if they want to customise a particular version of the dep, but would ever only need a single npm run start instance.

[ara4n]

in practice, i think this means:

• adding post-install scripts to js-sdk and react-sdk which make them build their /lib dirs after install (and checking it doesn't break CI or release processes), so that if npm pulls them in from github, they can still be used as real dependencies without having to manually npm run build them.
• making npm run start also somehow safely cascade into node_modules and recurse onto js-sdk and react-sdk too.

The end result would be that you could do:

git clone git+ssh://git@github.com/vector-im/riot-web
git checkout develop
cd riot-web
npm i
npm run start # or npm run build

...and it would 'do the right thing' and work.

@martindale, does that match your expectations?

[martindale]

@ara4n yes, this is great! Thanks for taking the time to write this up. I think it'll help a lot — if I have time this week, I'm going to take a crack at shoring up the dependency tree and making this work.

[bwindels]

I'd love our build setup to be simpler as well, but I wonder how js-sdk and react-sdk would get built after making local changes if you've set it up with npm link to come from some other local directory.

We might be able to configure webpack to monitor node_modules/matrix-js|react-sdk as well from riot-web, as described here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41522721/how-to-watch-certain-node-modules-changes-with-webpack-dev-server/44166532#44166532

[bwindels]

That approach seems less like npm conventions to me though (where every module is supposed to build itself), but taking this shortcut for local development only might be worth the convenience.

[ara4n]

I've started a google doc to try to gather and comment on options here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/138w2bb8BokVR6OJA7_5qIeDFkjp9GODzlrqhVC9sMEI/edit#

[turt2live]

This is mostly fixed by #7355 - we still have a couple oddities, although they seem unavoidable given the requirement to maintain a js-sdk and react-sdk separate to riot-web.