Packages going forward

[james-pre]

v0.10.0 was released recently. In the release, the Fetch and various port backends were moved from separate packages to the core. I'd like to explain why that was done as well as provide a plan for how I plan to structure the ZenFS packages in the future.

Merging @zenfs/port and @zenfs/fetch into @zenfs/core

The Fetch and various port backends were moved from separate packages to the core for a few reasons.

First, they are cross-platform, and one of the reasons why separate packages are used is to prevent pollution of the global namespace with variables that don't actually exist at runtime, which would make working on the project more difficult (e.g. lib.dom). Both @zenfs/fetch and @zenfs/port did not depend on any of these kinds of packages, so that was not a concern.

In addition, separate packages help to reduce bundle size. In this case, I don't think that @zenfs/fetch and @zenfs/port add too much to the bundle size: 206KB in 0.9.7 and 217KB in 0.10.0.

Packages going forward

I've created this flowchart to describe my process for deciding how to structure the packages:

Here are all of the current and planned backends, along with which packages they are or will be part of:

API	Backend	Package
Map	InMemory	@zenfs/core
Copy-on-write (readonly overlay)	Overlay	@zenfs/core
Worker	Port	@zenfs/core
HTTP Requests	Fetch	@zenfs/core
File System Access	WebAccess	@zenfs/dom
Indexed DB	IndexedDB	@zenfs/dom
Storage	WebStorage	@zenfs/dom
ZIP archives	Zip	@zenfs/zip
ISO images	Iso	@zenfs/iso
Planned / Work In Progress
Emscripten	Emscripten	@zenfs/emscripten
Dropbox	Dropbox	@zenfs/dropbox
Google Drive	GoogleDrive	@zenfs/google-drive
NodeJS Integration	NodeFS	@zenfs/node