CommonJS vs. es modules

[waldekmastykarz]

Recently, two of our dependencies (chalk and strip-json-comments) have been upgraded to a new major version that exports es modules (esm). It seems that we can't use them at the moment, because we transpile CLI with TypeScript to CommonJS (cjs). During transpilation TypeScript converts all import statements to require. Because es modules must be loaded using import, we get either TS or runtime errors (depending on the exact syntax we use to load the dependency). Unless there's a way for us to load es modules in cjs, we might need to do some refactoring in order to be able to keep our dependencies current.

@pnp/cli-for-microsoft-365-maintainers, @patrick-rodgers any tips you'd have that could help us move forward? Any caveats that we should consider before considering moving from cjs to esm?

[garrytrinder]

I'm not sure what the answer is here, its been a while since I've needed to look into modules differences to this level but maybe this could this help https://github.com/getify/moduloze ?

[waldekmastykarz]

I don't think it's about conversion as such. Our dependencies are ems and CLI is cjs. Since we're not maintaining these modules, we can't convert them. The way forward would be to change CLI to generate esm, but there's likely more to it that just flipping the setting in TypeScript.