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The node-addon-api team loves contributions. There are many ways in which you can contribute to node-addon-api:
- Source code fixes
- Additional tests
- Documentation improvements
- Joining the Node-API working group and participating in meetings
node-addon-api is meant to be a thin convenience wrapper around Node-API. With this in mind, contributions of any new APIs that wrap around a core Node-API API will be considered for merging. However, changes that wrap existing node-addon-api APIs are encouraged to instead be provided as an ecosystem module. The node-addon-api team is happy to link to a curated set of modules that build on top of node-addon-api if they have broad usefulness to the community and promote a recommended idiom or pattern.
The Node-API team considered a couple of different approaches with regard to changes extending node-addon-api
- Larger core module - Incorporate these helpers and patterns into node-addon-api
- Extras package - Create a new package (strawman name 'node-addon-api-extras') that contain utility classes and methods that help promote good patterns and idioms while writing native addons with node-addon-api.
- Ecosystem - Encourage the creation of a module ecosystem around node-addon-api where folks can build on top of it.
This is probably our simplest option in terms of immediate action needed. It would involve landing any open PRs against node-addon-api, and continuing to encourage folks to make PRs for utility helpers against the same repository.
The downside of the approach is the following:
- Less coherency for our API set
- More maintenance burden on the Node-API WG core team.
This involves us spinning up a new package that contains the utility classes and methods. This has the benefit of having a separate module where helpers make it easier to implement certain patterns and idioms for native addons easier.
The downside of this approach is the following:
- Potential for confusion - we'll need to provide clear documentation to help the community understand where a particular contribution should be directed to (what belongs in node-addon-api vs node-addon-api-extras)
- Need to define the level of support/API guarantees
- Unclear if the maintenance burden on the Node-API WG is reduced or not
This doesn't require a ton of up-front work from the Node-API WG. Instead of accepting utility PRs into node-addon-api or creating and maintaining a new module, the WG will encourage the creation of an ecosystem of modules that build on top of node-addon-api, and provide some level of advertising for these modules (listing them out on the repository/wiki, using them in workshops/tutorials etc).
The downside of this approach is the following:
- Potential for lack of visibility. Evangelism and education are hard, and module authors might not find the right patterns and instead implement things themselves
- There might be greater friction for the Node-API WG in evolving APIs since the ecosystem would have taken dependencies on the API shape of node-addon-api