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Summary

Add support for uninstalling node to volta uninstall

Motivation

Currently, Volta doesn't support uninstalling node due to this main reasons(as discussed in #327): Its main purpose is to save disk space, nowadays disk size is not a big problem in many cases. So this task is in a low priority.But community has this demand since 2019, they need to manually remove some files to achieve that.Add support for uninstalling node is more convinent in this case, btw since we have install here we should also have uninstall here.

Pedagogy

The user's intuition and way of treating it are opposite to install. Since install fetch node image, unpack it and set it as default, unintall should remove those things.

Details

The new command will have the structure:

volta uninstall node@version

totally the same with install.

Some examples:

volta uninstall node@20.16.0

volta uninstall node@lts

By add a uninstall to Tool trait and move uninstall logic from Spec to Node, Package, Npm, Yarn, Pnpm, it would resolve version with node::resolve first, and then remove tar.gz file and npm file in home.node_inventory_dir() and node in home.node_image_root_dir()

Critique

In fact we want uninstall to save disk space or just to remove those things we don't need , it seems like a command like prune or clean is more suitable, which tracks every tool's status, and when prune is runned, we can clean all those tools that is no longer used.

In this case, maybe we should use a file to track every tool. When volta pin or volta install is runned, the toolchain must be added to that file (means this toolchain is used in a project or is set as default), and removed outdated toolchain from that file. And we can delete all that we don't use anymore.

But this way will make some big change in volta, and how to track a toolchain's status is complex.

Unresolved questions

  1. What should uninstall do when uninstall a default node? Since install actually fetch (in background),unpack(in background), and set as default(in user's view), uninstall should at least remove tar.gz file, npm file and node dir. but what uninstall should do when uninstall a node version that is set as default?