Couldn't find documentation about single-file build or what "legacy" means

[Daniel15]

From @glasser on December 14, 2016 1:36

Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?

Documentation issue

What is the current behavior?

Yarn publishes (in GitHub releases) a "modern" and "legacy" single-file JavaScript build.

This build doesn't seem to be documented anywhere other than in a random section in a blog post.

It also takes a fair amount of poking around (not inside the files themselves!) to learn that "legacy" means Node 4 and "non-legacy" means Node 5.

These builds (which are useful!) should be documented, maybe in https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install#alternatives-tab , maybe in the release notes themselves.

Perhaps one could even change the build process to add a simple explanatory output (including required Node versions) to the top of the files.

Please mention your node.js, yarn and operating system version.

Just looking at https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/releases as of 0.18.0

Copied from original issue: yarnpkg/yarn#2248

[Daniel15]

From @glasser on December 14, 2016 2:10

Also perhaps worth documenting that if you use this version, you won't have node-gyp on your PATH, which will break some modules. See yarnpkg/yarn#1986

[Daniel15]

@bestander Do we need to keep building the "legacy" build? I agree that it's confusing, and it would be better if we could just omit it and only have the "modern" version.

[bestander]

We still have a major client using node4 version in fbsource afaik.

[Daniel15]

@bestander - Does the "legacy" build work on newer Node.js versions? If so, perhaps we should just have the legacy one, to simplify things a bit?

[bestander]

Yeah, of course "legacy" works for with Node 4+.
The advantage of non "legacy" build is that it is easier to debug without source maps - async/await is transpiled to generators quite cleanly.
I doubt if there are any performance wins for Yarn here, we can measure.

So yeah, I would say, let's build only "legacy" JS for releases.
Are you up to do the switch?
I wonder what @kittens thinks.