fix: binaries installed in invalid path in Node.js 20

[sounisi5011]

In Node.js 20, the behavior of the process.exit() function has changed.
As a result, npm 7.19.0 or later does not set the correct exit code on error.
See: npm/cli#6399
Therefore, the child_process.exec() function will not return an error.

This causes binaries to be installed in the wrong path. For example, in the case of go-task, it will be installed in a path such as:

.../node_modules/@go-task/cli/Unknown command: "bin"

To see a list of supported npm commands, run:
  npm help/task

This is the filepath. A multi-line string filepath like this is used.

See: go-task/task#1190

This happens when npm 9¹ is installed with Node.js 20.
However, the same problem may occur if the npm bin command fails with other errors (for example, if Corepack does not allow npm to run).

This bug was fixed in npm 9.6.7, but not all users are running the latest version of npm.
In particular, in the environment of users using yarn or pnpm, npm will remain at the old version built into Node.js and will not be updated to the new one.
So the getInstallationPath() function also needs to work around this bug.

This pull request modifies the getInstallationPath() function to avoid this npm bug.

Footnotes

1. The Unknown command: "bin" error occurs because the npm bin command has been removed from npm 9. ↩

[sounisi5011]

As noted in the code comments, this pull request determines the error message by "whether or not the trimmed stdout is an absolute path". This approach is not foolproof, but should work in most cases.

---

Another approach is to fix the process.exit() function by passing the --require option to the node command. The NODE_OPTIONS environment variable can be used to specify additional arguments to pass to the node command.
To do this, first write the following code in fix-node20-process-exit.cjs:

const origExit = process.exit;
Object.defineProperty(process, 'exit', {
  value: function(...args) {
    if (args[0] !== undefined || typeof process.exitCode !== 'number' || process.exitCode === 0) {
      origExit.apply(this, args);
    }
  },
});

Then, run the npm bin command like this:

$ NODE_OPTIONS="${NODE_OPTIONS} --require /path/to/fix-node20-process-exit.cjs" npm bin

This approach is more reliable than parsing stdout to detect failures of the npm bin command.

However, the process.exit() function has been intentionally fixed. Future npm commands may fail due to this workaround.

Also, fix-node20-process-exit.cjs cannot be combined into the same file at build time, so it must be generated dynamically or the build process must be changed. The former would have a negative impact on performance, and I have determined that the latter is beyond the scope of changes that should be made in this pull request.

Therefore, I did not choose this approach.

[andreynering]

Thanks @sounisi5011!