Hey Eiji, thanks for the feedback!
The _build directory seemed the most obvious place to put binaries given the citation below, and it’s also where tailwind stores its executable.
Excerpt from Phoenix’s “Directory structure” guide, which supports this decision imo:
_build - a directory created by the mix command line tool that ships as part of Elixir that holds all compilation artifacts. […] This directory must not be checked into version control and it can be removed at any time. Removing it will force Mix to rebuild your application from scratch.
That being said it could be made configurable, which would for example enable sharing the same Node.js binaries between projects.
The decision for Phoenix to store node_modules in the assets directory makes sense, as it actually contains assets used during the front-end bundling process.
Regarding semantic_release, I believe the decision to hide its node_modules behind _build makes sense, because it should only be used by itself.
Moreover, if multiple projects using nodelix install specific package versions in a shared node_modules in the root directory, that would lead to potential conflicts and unexpected behavior (without relying on a shared root package.json, which I discuss below).
Currently, the idea behind semantic_release is to abstract as much as possible the fact it’s using Node.js under the hood (thanks to nodelix). Having to maintain a package.json or run npm install in an Elixir project might be seen as an unwelcome overhead for many project maintainers.
The goal is that by simply installing semantic_release and running the Mix task without any configuration, you get the default Semantic Release experience. Then if you want a different release workflow than the default (which most likely will be the case), you can configure that through config.exs (to specify plugins to be installed) and .releaserc (to configure the workflow).
Additionally, I believe letting the end user manage the versions himself in a root package.json would limit the library’s ability to handle compatibility with the various Semantic Release major versions.
I come with great news!
)
