Allow script-shell config in package.json

[danielbayley]

RFC proposing that script-shell be directly configurable from package.json.

Rendered

[ljharb]

Which would take precedence if both files are defined? Wouldn’t this make npm config even slower, since for the first time it’d have to read and parse package.json, instead of just npmrc files and env vars?

[isaacs]

My main objection to this is that it seems weird to pick out this config value as the only one to set as a project-level config in package.json.

It seems easy enough to just add a blessed package.json object that would do project-level configs. The pattern in other node tools (babel, typescript, jest, tap, and nyc, that I'm aware of) is to use the name of the tool as the field name. So it'd look something like this:

{
  "name": "my-project",
  "version": "1.2.3",
  "npm": {
    "script-shell": "/bin/bash",
    "other-thing": "blarg"
  }
}

I don't think that'd be too terrible performance-wise, but it would mean that we have to update the config handling logic to treat both ./.npmrc and ./package.json as project-level config files. And, if there is both a npm field in package.json and a project-level .npmrc file, we'd have to decide which one has higher priority (or if it's an error to have both).

[isaacs]

As discussed in open RFC meeting today, we're not going to move forward with this, and instead will evaluate #59 and #60 separately, as these would provide a more general solution to the problem identified here.

Thanks!