Don't bundle and minify your published npm packages

https://twitter.com/kentcdodds/status/1394420201542668289?s=20

So the other day I tweeted about how I really want people to stop minifying

and bundling what they send to NPM. And just to clarify I it's fine if you

want to minify and bundle as one of the things you distribute as part of

your package, but it shouldn't be the only thing and there are a couple of

reasons and what I do for my packages is I actually do have a UMD module

that is bundled and I have a minified version of that as well.

So we have two of those and then I've got an ESM.R version which is like

fake ESM right now eventually I'll get around to making a native VSM

supported version. And then a common JS and those are the the four formats

that I shipped to NPM. So the reason that I really really don't want people

to exclusively ship minified code is even with source maps can it can be

really difficult to debug and especially when we're talking about libraries

that I'm interacting with well even even transitive dependencies.

I like to be able to.Stick a console log in there or to step through with a

debugger and it's just really difficult to do that if you've minified your

code and in particular what motivated me to tweet this in the first place

was I was working with a library that minified everything and it ended up

minifying its implementation of an abort signal and so the constructor name

was incorrect and node fetch actually checks the constructor name to know

if what you've passed is an abort signal which we could argue about whether

that's necessary or not, but the fact is that it does and becauseThey were

minifying it totally is unusable which is a less super annoying.

So that's notification then on the bundling side of things this can get to

be a real problem like if for example your bundling a particular library

and I'm already using that library in my project MPM can't dedupe that and

do means it says, oh you're using this library in this other dependency

uses that library too.

So we'll just have them both use the same files and therefore we don't have

to send.That code to the browser twice so we don't have to require that

code and evaluate it in person all that stuff. And so there are arguments

that people make about bundling as like performance improvement so like you

could do that with some tools and and that could be useful but it could

also be a big problem because then I can't like change the versions of the

things that I'm using and I don't have any control over that.

So there are a lot of issues there in general. So, please don't bundle

don't minify it's better this way. Let meDo that.