Moving away from dcli

[passsy]

dcli, has brought us more pain than it actually solved. Especially, because it continuously raised the minimum Dart SDK on patch releases without warning. We should try to move away from it completely and create or find replacements for the APIs provided by the package.

I set the target for sidekick: 3.0.0 which I prefer to have sooner than later.

##APIs we have to replace:

starting a child process

This is the most crucial one.

• dcli.start, dcli.run to start a process and read stdout

Could be replaced with https://github.com/google/dart_cli_script. I even got a prototype. But is seem unmaintained and is a pure async API, unlike dcli which is synchronous by design

env and PATH

• read write env
• add to path (sidekick install-global)

Script path

• DartScript.self.pathToScript one of the magics of dcli. Honestly, this function is great. It tells where the dart script that is currently being executed is located on disk.

interactivity

• asks prompts, menu and confirm

sleep

• a sleep function that waits real time

printing

• printerr is helpful but can easily provided by us
• red(), green(), yellow() and friends can be directly imported from https://pub.dev/packages/ansi

Pubspec

• Read values from pubspec without dcli (#232) #233
• write into pubspec (only in sidekick_test)

[Giuspepe]

Regarding the task pubspec -> write into pubspec: we're only using this functionality from dcli in sidekick_test, so dcli is just a dev dependency there and thus we can ignore it

[danielmolnar]

I think with the introduction of Dart 3.3 this becomes more relevant than ever.
Sidekick update to the latest throws:

Synchronous waiting using dart:cli waitFor and C API Dart_WaitForEvent is deprecated and disabled by default. This feature will be fully removed in Dart 3.4 release. You can currently still enable it by passing --enable_deprecated_wait_for to the Dart VM. See https://dartbug.com/52121.
dart:cli-patch/cli_patch.dart 9    

Context: Dart 3.3: waitFor is now disabled by default, but can be temporarily enabled by passing the flag --enable_deprecated_wait_for to the VM / dart command

There are pre-releases of dcli that do no longer use waitFor though like 4.0.0

What do you think @passsy

[passsy]

Another incident #251

It's now time