Use peer dependencies for EC

[hippotastic]

Hello, first of all, thank you very much for creating this plugin!

I noticed while looking through the code that you are using regular dependencies on EC's core and plugin-frames packages. This can lead to multiple different versions of EC being present on the same site if people run a different minor version of EC. I'd recommend changing these dependencies to peer dependencies so your plugin cannot cause this scenario.

Again, thank you for publishing this! 🙌

[xt0rted]

Thanks for the feedback. I was wondering if it'd be better to make that a peer dependency. I ran into an issue with expressive-code-color-chips which does use a peer dependency where it pulled in @expressive-code/core 0.37.1 and was using that, while the rest of the app was using 0.42.0, and I was getting type conflicts with the plugins. I had to add legacy-peer-deps=true to my .npmrc so it'd stop doing that which isn't great but got my site working.

[hippotastic]

Huh, that sounds strange. The entire idea of using peer deps was to prevent a plugin from
pulling in the wrong version.

Which package manager did you test this with, and did you have any other non-standard settings on the site where this happened? I'd be happy to test this as well and see if I can come up with a solution in case this is reproducible.

[xt0rted]

Node 23.7.0 and NPM 10.9.2, no custom settings. I'll see if I can put a minimal repro together.

[xt0rted]

Here's a minimal repro https://github.com/xt0rted-test/expressive-code-plugins. There's a couple branches that show the same issue with other plugins, as well as a branch that sets legacy-peer-deps=true and does not pull in two versions of expressive-code.

[hippotastic]

Awesome, thank you for the effort in creating these reproductions. I'll have a look at them soon and keep you posted.

[hippotastic]

Ohh. I have an idea. The reason might be that my packages are still 0.x versions, and the range before 1.0.0 follows stricter semver rules. A plugin having a peer dependency on ^0.39.1 will not accept an EC version 0.40.2 in the project, as 0.40.2 is not matched by the semver range.

I guess I'd either have to release 1.0.0 of EC to fix this, or plugins should specify their peer dependencies like >=0.39.3 <1.0.0 until V1.0.0 of EC is out.

[xt0rted]

That's what I was thinking. 0.x.x versions are considered pre-release I thought, so I was wondering if there was different behavior when matching them but I haven't seen mention of that in the docs. I didn't look very hard though.