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@google-cloud/common uses a lot of dependencies #1514
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This is not a problem unique to our library. It's well known that npm's hyper-modular approach brings the cost of many dependencies. All we can do is watch how many dependencies we take on, and of course we do. npm version 3 is helping by enabling de-duplicating packages by default. We can't control what other libraries take on as dependencies, so that's when we end up with multiple versions of the same dependency.
If you have concrete suggestions of alternative packages that offer the same benefits as the ones we use, please let us know-- or better yet, PR! As an ecosystem at whole, that's the best way to help each other. I've sent many PRs in the past to heavy modules to introduce the files array from package.json to eliminate excess downloads.
I'm going to close, but to be clear, we do think about this and we do hear you.
TL;DR: Please focus on gradually reducing the number of dependencies going forward.
I was looking at using the
@google-cloud/pubsubmodule and wanted to dive deeper into how auth worked and ended up in@google-cloud/common. It turns out that@google-cloud/commonalone downloads about 39 MiB (~5MB) of files. Awesome! 👍I don't have any solid recommendations for reducing the number of dependencies but just wanted to bring this up as something to think about going forward.
For instance, did you know that
@google-cloud/commonindirectly depends on three separate versions of request?Take a look at this awesome dependency visualization of
@google-cloud/commonif you have a minute.http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/%2540google-cloud%252Fcommon