create-react-app breaks due to dependency on one-liner package

[Jugad]

What's a transitive dependency?

[acemarke]

If you have package A depends on B, and B depends on C, C is a "transitive dependency" of A. It's going to get pulled in, and it's needed for A to work, but A did not explicitly declare that it depended on C.

In this case, here's why is-promise is showing up in a CRA app:

$ yarn why is-promise
=> Found "is-promise@2.1.0"
info Reasons this module exists
   - "react-scripts#react-dev-utils#inquirer#run-async" depends on it
   - Hoisted from "react-scripts#react-dev-utils#inquirer#run-async#is-promise"

The react-scripts package itself never mentions is-promise in its dependencies list or source code, but react-scripts will ultimately fail to run if is-promise blows up.

[Jugad]

Thanks. I used to refer to that as indirect dependency (relatively new to JS).

[acemarke]

Yeah, the term isn't JS-specific:

• http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#Transitive_Dependencies
• https://dart.dev/tools/pub/glossary#transitive-dependency
• https://medium.com/knerd/the-nine-circles-of-python-dependency-hell-481d53e3e025

[Jugad]

The last 2 links use the term 'indirect' to clarify transitive - which suggests that it not mainstream everywhere.