[Feauture Discussion] Auto-create necessary package.json files

[escottalexander]

Related to #237. After a user runs yarn create-extension, why can't we auto generate the package.json files completely?

It seems to me it would just be a matter of comparing package.json files as JavaScript Objects and adding whatever doesn't exist in both to the final extension package.json(s).

For instance, the user may add a package and/or script to the hardhat/package.json and then be told they need to add a package.json to their extension directory. We should be able to load the default SE-2 package.json and the pre-extension project's package.json and perform a deep compare on them as objects to determine what would need to be added to the final extension package.json.

[technophile-04]

Sorry missed this, the feature makes complete sense!

Actually while developing initial version create-extension we just wanted the basics to works. But since the initial version looks solid this and #237 we should def do it!

[carletex]

+1!

[rin-st]

It's not clear for me, which version to add to the extension package, if the same dependency has different versions on user's instance used for create-extension and on create-eth. Intuitively it feels that instance version should have priority but not sure it's always right. For example: user created instance with nextjs 14 and works on his app. We update create-eth to nextjs 15. User runs yarn create-extension. Which version should we use? I think 15, the one from create-eth. But what if user locked the version of the dependency intentionally? Then 14. Reminder: when creating the instance with extension, extension deps versions has priority over create-eth versions

[escottalexander]

Hmm... I see that would be hard to determine what version is intended in each case. This may be a lot of overhead and complexity but is there a way to compare the git history so that we can see if the user updated a specific version vs it just being set because that was the default when he created the repo?