The file blacklisting function doesn't work

[johnnyman727]

We used to be able to have a hardware section of the package.json that would allow you to exclude files from the bundle. It doesn't seem to work anymore.

[LinusU]

Would this be a good opportunity to tweak the usage a bit? It feels a bit strange that the key hardware is a list of files to be excluded.

I think that a better approach would be either to place it under hardware.ignoreFiles, or, maybe even better, use the existing file key.

From the package.json spec

files

The "files" field is an array of files to include in your project. If you name a folder in the array, then it will also include the files inside that folder. (Unless they would be ignored by another rule.)

You can also provide a ".npmignore" file in the root of your package, which will keep files from being included, even if they would be picked up by the files array. The ".npmignore" file works just like a ".gitignore".

Any files not in the files array would not be sent to the tessel.

[Frijol]

+1 that hardware is a bit unintuitive. The original thought was to strip out specific files for hardware (& this space-limited) applications. @tcr you probably have thoughts on this

[johnnyman727]

I like the idea of making it more explicit like with hardware.ignoreFiles. I'm not a big fan of the file key because I usually want to push more files than I holdback so it would be a pain to add all of those entries.

[LinusU]

I'm not sure that I like this approach but just to float the idea; Npm is also using a .npmignore file which follows the classic .gitignore format. We could have a .tesselignore with a list of files that isn't pushed to the hardware. Thoughts?

In addition to that we could have hardware.files which, if specified, only includes files from that array. When folders are specified in that array, all files under that folder are included, unless specifically ignored by the .tesselignore file.

Maybe the file should be named .hardwareignore.

Or just straight up use files and .npmignore, that would result in the same files being pushed to the tessel as would be published to npm.

[johnnyman727]

I'm partial to not adding any more config files to projects but I can see the merit behind .hardwareIgnore. @LinusU any reason you prefer that over a hardware.ignoreFiles property?

[LinusU]

Not at all, I just wanted to float the idea.

But the more I think of it I personally like the idea of using files for specifying which files should be included, instead of specifying which should be ignored. For me this would usually just be ['index.js', 'lib/'].

I definitively think that we should support the standard files. Then the question is if we also want to extend the package.json with hardware.ignoreFiles, and if there is demand for than of course we should do that.

@johnnyman727 you mentioned that you rather list the ignored files because you have more files to include than to ignore. Is that also true if you could specify whole directories in files?

[xseignard]

Hello,
I'm not sure but it seems using files could break some modules that can run on tessel and other hardware (such as a plain old computer) by ignoring files that should only be ignored in the tessel case.

This is what we are trying to achieve here xseignard/thermalPrinter#7

Any thoughts?

Regards

[LinusU]

@xseignard You do not need anything special from tessel to achieve what you want, I have answered your question and submitted pull requests to the repo to show you how it's done. Happy coding 👍