Upgrade to Yarn 2

[peterbe]

There's no denying, Yarn 1 is slowly losing momentum compared to Yarn 2 (and npm ~6).
https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/qa#why-should-you-upgrade-to-yarn-modern

I actually don't think it would be that hard to upgrade Yari to it but for the mdn/content we want to keep things as simple as possible because we expect a LOT of content contributors to check it out and run yarn/node to do previewing. For that, it would most convenient if we did NOT rely on bleeding edge versions.

This issue should first be about documenting the impact of "requiring" Yarn 2. And secondly, about implementing the switch to it.

[peterbe]

One of the nasty bugs we encountered when using workspaces just got "ignored" with this comment:
yarnpkg/yarn#4098 (comment)
More fuel for moving to Yarn 2.

[bershanskiy]

Great to hear this!

This issue should first be about documenting the impact of "requiring" Yarn 2.

This official document goes into great detail about migration footguns. Have you had a chance to review this doc?

[peterbe]

@bershanskiy What worries me the most is that a lot of people will have Node and Yarn 1 installed on their machines. If they now can't start Yari because they have to figure out how to get apt-get or brew to work for Yarn 2, that would lead to unhappiness.
To me, it's a bit like "Shall we require that everything has Node 15 and Python 3.9 installed?"

No, I haven't yet had a chance to read that whole document. I haven't even had a chance to install it myself for my own projects. Does it say anything useful/interesting to calm my keep-it-simple-for-most-people nerves?

[peterbe]

PS. There are some cool features in Node >10 but we deliberately kept the minimum to Node >=10 just to keep things are easy and pain-free as possible for most contributors.

However, for the Yari project, I think we can be a bit more "aggressive". Only a handful of coders will work on mdn/yari. But 10x will be expected to work on mdn/content. And the "audience" is different (aka skill levels).
Considering that all the fancy TypeScript and stuff in Yari gets transpiled down to ES5 code that we package via NPM, perhaps there's a way to leave the mdn/content use Yarn1 and the mdn/yari project start requiring Yarn2.

[bershanskiy]

Does it say anything useful/interesting to calm my keep-it-simple-for-most-people nerves?

Luckily, that doc is very anti-climactic: it basically urges people to migrate away from old config files, old package versions, old ways to call things. After light searching through yari's code, I couldn't find a single incompatibility. However, I didn't test anything yet.

I'll try yarn 2 over the weekend and report back the results. :)

[Ryuno-Ki]

@bershanskiy Any updates?

[caugner]

FWIW @queengooborg tried to update us to the latest yarn version in #6271. And even though we want to migrate to npm eventually, migrating to yarn v2/v3 first is still an option.

[fwqaaq]

FWIW @queengooborg tried to update us to the latest yarn version in #6271. And even though we want to migrate to npm eventually, migrating to yarn v2/v3 first is still an option.

Why not migrate to pnpm, which has faster speed (because it can download packages in parcallel)

[caugner]

We will switch to npm in #6322 by May 2023, and no longer plan upgrading to Yarn 2.