microsoft / microsoft/TypeScript

typesVersions should support aliasing specific files (or document this will not be supported)

Open
#43,953 0 comments 1 reaction 1 assignee View on GitHub

@rbuckton is already working on this.

Since May 7, 2021.

Needs Investigation Rescheduled
Dominant language
Go
Stars
111k
Forks
14.3k
Avg merge
2d 4h
Merged PRs (30d)
132

Description

Suggestion

🔍 Search Terms

typesVersions, backwards compatibility, path alias

✅ Viability Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

  • This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
  • This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
  • This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
  • This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, new syntax sugar for JS, etc.)
  • This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

⭐ Suggestion

Enable aliasing a single file with Advanced Types or document this isn't possible. The language on the docs currently says:

File redirects

When you want to only change the resolution for a single file at a time, you can tell TypeScript the file to resolve differently by passing in the exact filenames:

However, passing any exact filename doesn't seem to work. For example, if dist/index.d.ts imports dist/helpers/advanced-types.d.ts, which should fall back to helpers/legacy-types.d.ts for older TS versions, this doesn't seem to work. I've tried:

  • dist/helpers/advanced-types.d.ts
  • dist/helpers/advanced-types
  • helpers/advanced-types.d.ts
  • helpers/advanced-types
  • */advanced-types.d.ts
  • */advanced-types
  • advanced-types.d.ts
  • advanced-types

📃 Motivating Example

Using something like template literals, I would like to create a single file that contains these, with some fallbacks with legacy code for TypeScript users who do not have the ability to update right away.

💻 Use Cases

The only workaround I've found is to create another package which exports a different index.d.ts to be used with the main project. There would be too many different uses of the types exported to re-create the entire project with the different imports.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.