[FEATURE] Flatten output of `npm fund`

[wheresrhys]

What / Why

npm fund currently nests funding information for transitive dependencies in a nested tree structure. This has several drawbacks:

• Harder to read (or parse) output
• Unfairly penalises the maintainers of lower level libraries e.g say I maintain a library which is a key dependency of express, but otherwise not widely used, my fund link will have a lower profile despite being an equally important part of the nodejs ecosystem.

I propose that npm fund returns a flat structure by default, with an option to return a nested structure. Or, failing that, that the default behaviour remains as is, but it supports an option to return a flattened structure.

Context - I would like to build a tool for my organisation that collates npm fund information across all our projects, and a flat structure is easier to work with.

When

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Where

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How

Current Behavior

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Expected Behavior

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Who

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References

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[ljharb]

(For parsing, there's npm fund --json)

It seems to me that the current state is an advantage for you - it'll be clear that you're a dep of express, and it won't be confusing to a developer who never put your package name explicitly in their package.json.

Either way, feature proposals need to go in https://github.com/npm/rfcs instead of here.

[ruyadorno]

First of all, thanks @wheresrhys for taking the time to send the constructive feedback and thanks @ljharb for helping out with the accurate answers (making my life easier) 😁

(For parsing, there's npm fund --json)

👍 to that, for tooling of any sort npm fund --json is what you'll want to use 😊

Either way, feature proposals need to go in https://github.com/npm/rfcs instead of here.

Again 👍 the RFC Repo is the correct place to propose changes, there's also bi-weekly video calls that you can join in order to pitch your ideas or follow the discussions but the best way to get started is by proposing an RFC via PR in that repo 😄