lib cleanup: fix exported Helper object

[brodybits]

This would very likely affect where we use the declared Helper object type proposed in PR #14.

/cc @rbiggs - I would appreciate some feedback on this proposal.

These changes would be moved out of PR #9.

[rbiggs]

I have one big question about this project. I see you have lib/program-helper.js and bin/glob-tsc.js but I'm not seeing any build script. How is the bin version getting generated? Are you directly creating it? If so, why does the lib/program-helper.js exist? I see in your package.json that your pointing to the bin file. I'm confused. Normally the bin version gets produced by a build process. You would be running tests on the source code, not on the bin version, but I see you're running checkjs on the bin version. That's likely to always fail because there'll never be any type information in that.

[brodybits]

The bin script just imports the lib file, as a CommonJS module, and old Node.js versions are not supported, so no build should be needed here. This project is not meant to be run in a browser.

Does this answer your question?

[rbiggs]

Ah, so it's not getting generated. Just wondering because there's a type error in it, but it wouldn't make sense to fix it if its being generated during a build.

[rbiggs]

OK, a type problem I'm seeing. In program-helper.js you have getOptions. It looks like the way its working its returning a string, not a Command object. But after that, you then have:

// Here commander is a string, so you can't attach 'unknown' to it as a property.
commander.unknown = commander.parseOptions(process.argv).unknown;

So in glob-tsc.js when you have:

options = helper.getOptions(),
commandArgs = options.unknown.concat(helper.resolveTSFiles()),

I get a type error because property unknown doesn't exist on type string.
What type is helper.getOptions supposed to be returning? I don't follow what Commander does in your code. Not familiar with it.

[brodybits]

// Here commander is a string, so you can't attach 'unknown' to it as a property.

That does not sound right to me.

[brodybits]

Hi @rbiggs just a heads up that I may switch to a simpler solution for doing checkjs with globs, with help from the globby package. I will keep you posted. I will still maintain this package at least for a little while. I would hate to see you waste time on something that I may not maintain forever if we can avoid it.

[rbiggs]

Here's what I'm finding in VSCode:

[rbiggs]

By the way, I tried doing type coercion to force options from string to Command, but no dice. As far as TypeScript is concerned that's a string.

[brodybits]

I will take a look at it later this week. FYI I published https://github.com/brodybits/check-js-types which uses meow for the CLI and globby@7 to resolve glob patterns. Should be much simpler than the implementation in this project.