What's the problem with Yarn 2?
Yarn 2 makes a bold step in fixing the node ecosystem, but the community isn’t happy about the approach…
In the last few days, I’ve seen a huge divide in opinion about the newly released Yarn 2. Engineers from both Twitter and Facebook have publically stated that they do not plan on migrating to Yarn 2 any time soon, even going as far as to suggest that they may even switch back to NPM.
One of the biggest gripes engineers seem to have is that Yarn 2 is such a drastic change that it isn’t even compatible with many projects, including some of the most popular ones like React Native. Yarn 2 does away with the node_modules directory, and instead introduces a Plug'n'Play model. While this is aimed at solving one of the biggest bugbears of NPM, this breaks compatibility with many projects that rely heavily on the node_modules structure, projects like React Native.
This wouldn’t be such a problem had the team added backwards compatibility for old Yarn 1 / NPM style behaviour. Sadly though, it seems that this was an afterthought and node_module support for Yarn 2 is still being worked on. However, most engineers are rightly concerned that Yarn 1 is already in maintenance mode and is referred to as legacy, especially since Yarn 2 is likely to have a slow adoption rate for the…
