Recent release broke our build

[stbrody]

Describe the bug
All of a sudden today the build in our CI system started failing with the error:

 FAIL  src/__tests__/doc-state-subject.test.ts
  ● Test suite failed to run

    ReferenceError: TextDecoder is not defined

    > 1 | import CID from 'cids';
        | ^
      2 | import { DocStateSubject } from '../doc-state-subject';
      3 | import { CommitType, DocState } from "../doctype";
      4 | 

      at Object.<anonymous> (../../node_modules/uint8arrays/to-string.js:4:21)
      at Object.<anonymous> (../../node_modules/cids/node_modules/multihashes/src/index.js:9:28)
      at Object.<anonymous> (../../node_modules/cids/src/index.js:3:12)
      at Object.<anonymous> (src/__tests__/doc-state-subject.test.ts:1:1)

Note that I didn't manually update package.json in any way to get to the newest version, we just use the ^ and ~ in some places to pull in newer minor versions of packages when they get released, but minor versions aren't supposed to include breaking changes. It seems like when uint8arrays v2.1.4 got released, npm picked it up and started using it in CI, which broke our build. Note our package.json specifies "uint8arrays": "^2.0.5".

I'm currently in the process of going through all our package.json files and pinning to version 2.0.5 to get things working again, but ideally this wouldn't be necessary as the semantic versioning system should already protect us against pulling in unexpected breaking changes.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: uname -a: Linux Sonny 5.8.0-43-generic #49~20.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 5 09:57:56 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.

[stbrody]

Note this is likely related to multiformats/js-multibase#90 as they started happening at the same time and look very similar

[achingbrain]

What js runtime is your CI using?

[achingbrain]

ReferenceError: TextDecoder is not defined

TextDecoder is a global in all modern browsers and in node as of v11 - are you using an older environment?

[stbrody]

ReferenceError: TextDecoder is not defined

TextDecoder is a global in all modern browsers and in node as of v11 - are you using an older environment?

We use node v14 for everything

[stbrody]

I can repro this on my local machine as well, where I have

> node --version
v14.15.5
> npm --version
6.14.11

[achingbrain]

Looks like Jest might have an incomplete environment? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57712235/referenceerror-textencoder-is-not-defined-when-running-react-scripts-test

[stbrody]

Looks like Jest might have an incomplete environment? stackoverflow.com/questions/57712235/referenceerror-textencoder-is-not-defined-when-running-react-scripts-test

Yeah, that does seem likely to be the issue. Instead of having to update all of our packages that depend in any way on uint8arrays or multibase, would you be open to a PR that changes the use of TextEncoder within those packages to import util and use util.TextEncoder @achingbrain?

[achingbrain]

It shouldn’t be necessary to use node internals to use TextEncoder/Decoder as it’s defined globally in supported environments. We’re also trying to remove use of node internals wherever possible so I’d rather not unless it’s impossible to do it any other way.

Really JSDom needs to add global TextEncoder/Decoder implementations: jsdom/jsdom#2524

[achingbrain]

It looks like there’s an in-progress PR to do exactly that: jsdom/whatwg-encoding#11

[stbrody]

Sorry about my panic and frustration-fueled issue reporting yesterday, I was really shaken by our whole build breaking out from under us with no changes from our end. Thank you for all your help and for pointing me in the right direction! We were able to fix the issue by tweaking our jest configuration to use --env=node.

Closing this issue as there is nothing needed within uint8arrays

[achingbrain]

Not at all, I’m sorry you had a rough time. Glad you got to the bottom of it - hopefully that JSDom pr will get merged & rolled up soon.