phin should be upgraded or removed

[KernelDeimos]

apparently it wasn't actually okay to use phin until yesterday

The package jimp depends on this. It processes images. My use-case for it is a fallback image resizer when an optional compiled image resizer is not available.

A module I'm using to resize images... depends on an http client.

Is this for browser environments specifically? Is there a convenient way to disable this, or a way I can be entirely sure it will never be used within a nodejs environment?

[lorand-horvath]

@KernelDeimos It seems this package is maintained by @mattdesl among others.
If upgrading from phin 2 to phin 3 takes as much time as it did for parse-bmfont-xml (10 months) mattdesl/parse-bmfont-xml#4
then I'd probably completely forget about jimp altogether.

I also use jimp as fallback for sharp as the latter doesn't run on the CloudLinux 6 OS of a certain hosting company. But they're in the process of upgrading to CloudLinux 8, which should run sharp without problems. Hence no need for jimp anymore.

[mattdesl]

I’ll be honest; I don’t know why jimp (an image manipulation library) needs to depend on my module (font tools for games). It seems like scope bloat.

One of the goals of this library is to load a URL resource that might be a buffer or json response, and decode the BMFont file spec into memory in a convenient way, primarily for games and web graphics. So I do not think it makes sense to strip HTTP requests out—it would make the module significantly less useful (it would also be a breaking change). The other goal is for this code to be isomorphic; so it makes no sense to break Node support.

And, deprecation does not mean broken—the developer of phin seems to not have the time to support it, but there is not any reported issue with the version this module depends on.

I think you would be better off taking up your issue with the upstream package rather than this one. Cheers!

[lorand-horvath]

@mattdesl Is it difficult to update the phin dependency in load-bmfont from v2 to the latest v3?
That would solve the issue. I understand your position regarding scope bloat, but I don't think jimp would remove the load-bmfont dependency and replace it with something else.

Either way, I will use sharp exclusively from now on, since my hosting company is finishing upgrading to CloudLinux 8 on all servers in the coming couple of months.

[zdm]

Best principal of reliable development - do not use third party packages if this is possible, because usually they are not maintained as they should.
For HTTP requests - embedded nodejs libs are preferrable ( http of retch )..