A steam locomotive from 1993 broke my yarn test

The fact that Jest blindly calls whatever binary is installed as `sl` is downright reckless and that's an understatement. If they need the check, a simple way to avoid the problem would be to install it as a dependency, call `require.resolve()` [0] and Bob's your uncle. If they don't want the bundle size, write a heuristic, surely Meta can afford it. Blindly stuffing strings into exec and hoping it works out is not fine.

[0] https://nodejs.org/api/modules.html#requireresolverequest-op...

"That's just, like, your opinion, man". There is another school of thought that postulates that an app should use whatever tools that exist in the ambient environment that the user has provided the app with, instead of pulling and using random 4th-party dependencies from who knows where. If I symlinked e.g. "find", or "python3", or "sh", or "sl" to my weird interceptor/preprocessor/trapper script, that most likely means that I do want the apps to use it, damn it, not their own homebrewed versions.

> a simple way to avoid the problem would be to install it as a dependency

I've seen once a Makefile that had "apt remove -y [libraries and tools that somehow confuse this Makefile] ; apt install -y [some other random crap]" as a pre-install step, I kid you not. Thankfully, I didn't run it with "sudo make" (as the README suggested) but holy shit, the presumptuousness of some people.

The better way would have been to have "Sapling CLI" explicitly declared as a dependency, and checked for, somehow. But as the whole history of dev experience shows, that's too much ask from the people, and the dev containers are, sadly, the sanest and most robust way to go.

I think where our opinions differ is what boundaries this logic should cross. When I'm in Bash-land, I'm happy that my Bash-isms use the rest of what's available in the Bash env. When I'm in Node, likewise, as this is an expected and desirable outcome. Where this doesn't sit right with me is when a Node-land script crosses this boundary and starts murking around with things from a different domain.

In general, I would want everything to work by the principle of least surprise, so Node stuff interacts with Node dependencies, Python does Python things, Bash does Bash env, etc. If I need one to interact with the other, I want to be explicit about it, not have some spooky action at a distance.

Completely understandable, it's just... it's just not in the cards. A large part of UNIX ecosystem has not, historically, been kind to this view. Remember autotools/autoconf, makefiles with DESTDIR, and all that similar jazz? People genuinely proposed that stuff as the solution for the management of ambient dependencies. And it takes just one slip up of "shelling out" (hopefully it's actually "forking off", not literally shelling out) for all kinds of funny business re-appearing again — and don't even start on the /lib and .so management.