Enable requiring the package.json

[CMCDragonkai]

Description

The package.json is a useful to be able to read inside the source code. This is because it contains version information that we often need to provide in our own program.

There are 2 ways of acquiring the package.json:

import packageJson from '../package.json';
const packageJson = require('../package.json');

The former is using ES6 imports, and will trigger typescript to resolve and compile it.

TSC will ask for resolveJsonModule: true option in tsconfig.json. However if we enable it to be true, then the package.json file will be copied in the dist/ directory.

dist
├── package.json
└── src

At this point in time, we don't really want this, although we could adapt by changing the main and types path in package.json.

Ideally TSC will just not copy package.json, but there's only 2 ways to do this.

First way is to remove resolveJsonModule: true so that it's not resolved. Then make tsc ignore the error:

// @ts-expect-error package.json is outside the compiled dist
import { version } from '../package.json';

Then when compiling it works.

Second way, just use require, and tsc will ignore it.

The second way is not as good idea if we want to later move to ES6 style imports/exports as in #32.

The first way has one limitation, the resolveJsonModule must be false. This means we are making TSC not check/resolve the json module at all and therefore there's no type information. This means we cannot use import json module anywhere, and TSC won't have any type information about JSON that is imported.

This can be a problem, and then JSON would have to be considered non-source code, but instead static assets that should be acquired elsewhere.

An alternative to this solution is https://stackoverflow.com/a/61467483/582917 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/61467483/582917. These suggest creating a tsconfig.json under src as well as tsconfig.json in the root.

In our PK code, we have to use resolveJsonModule: true (due to our json schema), so our only option is to use require right now. We must continue this PR to try the other solutions so that #32 can be used.

Tasks

1. - Try out the require method
2. - Try out @ts-ignore method
3. - Try out the super and subproject method

Final checklist

• Domain specific tests
• Full tests
• Updated inline-comment documentation
• Lint fixed
• Squash and rebased
• Sanity check the final build

[CMCDragonkai]

A dynamic import has the same problem, if --resolveJsonModule is used it ends up acquiring it and copying it. But in that case no need for @ts-expect-error.

[CMCDragonkai]

Dynamic imports would require top level await. And that requires using ES6 modules. So for now that's not an option until we try #32.

But I found a solution to this problem.

The idea is to use rootDir to say ./src. This forces TSC to always treat src as the root dir. Then when importing from ../package.json it will cause an error. This is when we use @ts-ignore to ignore it.

Strangely, the @ts-expect-error cannot be used, I guess it's in a different part of the pipeline. But doing this allows us to enable resolveJsonModule and then we can in fact import JSON from inside ./src and ../package.json is just a special case.

[CMCDragonkai]

Ok I think this will work in PK, merging.