Credo maintenance, cleanup and technical debt

[TimoGlastra]

Over the years the repo has grown quite a lot. The maintenance burden of Credo is higher than other repos we maintain, where we have a simpler setup. This discussion is to create a list of items to improve the maintenance of Credo

• Tests are slow to run
  • We've seen significant improvements adopting node:test or vitest. Problem is usually usage of decorators.
  • We can move even more tests away from Askar, or to in-memory. Askar also seems to be an issue still of random errors in CI, I think part of the reason is that a lot of different processes are calling the same Askar library, creating a lot of IO.
  • tests are not succesfully ended. Somehow there are still processes running. It's hard to know what causes this.
• formatting and linting is slow
  • We've seen significant improvements adopting biome. Issue Switch from prettier + eslint to Biome #2145
• Credo has a lot of dependencies, making maintenance more complex
  • remove dependencies we don't really need
    • new node versions and maturing of the ecosystem mean some libraries might not be needed anymore. We should evaluate all libraries and try to ditch any library that is not strictly needed.
    • this makes updating to newer versions simpler
• Credo has dependencies that are not made for react native
  • mainly the W3C vc libraries are 'hacked' to make it work for
• Credo has packages that are not maintained
  • E.g. the BBS+ package is unmaintained and should be removed.
• Make Credo a pure ESM package #2157

[swcurran]

A couple of side notes about the Askar piece. There was a fix PR 350 put into Askar yesterday about a race condition that @andrewwhitehead stumbled across — perhaps some of the random errors?

FWIW: In ACA-Py we just removed the in-memory tests in favour of Askar with the SQLLite magic “:memory:” file name. This was done to remove the “test” only in-memory implementation so that more of the storage stack is used in the testing — with some performance improvements.

[TimoGlastra]

Thanks for the note. Maybe it has to do with the Askar library loading yes. TBH it's very hard to debug as it happens randomly. More in CI than on my laptop (I think due to CI being slower/less resources).

It's usually to do with the actual IO (so writing to/from the askar database file). We've moved a lot to :memory: as well, but we can't use it for all the migration/export/import tests, as well as some tests that shutdown the agent in between (As the wallet is closed and thus discarded).

[TimoGlastra]

@swcurran here's an example of a failed test run. If you have any pointers on what this could mean would love to hear it! :) https://github.com/openwallet-foundation/credo-ts/actions/runs/13015013349/job/36301897239

  ● AskarWallet basic operations › Encrypt and decrypt using JWE ECDH-ES

    Error acquiring pool connection
    Caused by: error returned from database: (code: 522) disk I/O error

      at NodeJSAriesAskar.getAriesAskarError (../../node_modules/.pnpm/@hyperledger+aries-askar-nodejs@0.2.3/node_modules/@hyperledger/aries-askar-nodejs/src/NodeJSAriesAskar.ts:220:12)
      at cb (../../node_modules/.pnpm/@hyperledger+aries-askar-nodejs@0.2.3/node_modules/@hyperledger/aries-askar-nodejs/src/NodeJSAriesAskar.ts:170:30)
      at Object.<anonymous> (../../node_modules/.pnpm/@2060.io+ffi-napi@4.0.9/node_modules/@2060.io/ffi-napi/lib/callback.js:66:27)

[TimoGlastra]

Another one here: https://github.com/openwallet-foundation/credo-ts/actions/runs/13045949939/job/36396457516?pr=2164

  ● Askar SQLite agents › when creating already existing wallet throw WalletDuplicateError

    WalletError: Error saving record

      36 |       }
      37 |
    > 38 |       throw new WalletError('Error saving record', { cause: error })
         |             ^
      39 |     }
      40 |   }
      41 |

      at AskarStorageService.save (src/storage/AskarStorageService.ts:38:13)
      at StorageVersionRepository.save (../core/src/storage/Repository.ts:29:5)
      at StorageUpdateService.setCurrentStorageVersion (../core/src/storage/migration/StorageUpdateService.ts:49:7)
      at WalletApi.createAndOpen (../core/src/wallet/WalletApi.ts:83:5)
      at WalletApi.create (../core/src/wallet/WalletApi.ts:87:5)
      at Object.<anonymous> (tests/askar-sqlite.test.ts:255:5)

    Cause:
    Error pinging session
    Caused by: error returned from database: (code: 1) no such table: profiles

      at NodeJSAriesAskar.getAriesAskarError (../../node_modules/.pnpm/@hyperledger+aries-askar-nodejs@0.2.3/node_modules/@hyperledger/aries-askar-nodejs/src/NodeJSAriesAskar.ts:220:12)
      at cb (../../node_modules/.pnpm/@hyperledger+aries-askar-nodejs@0.2.3/node_modules/@hyperledger/aries-askar-nodejs/src/NodeJSAriesAskar.ts:170:30)
      at Object.<anonymous> (../../node_modules/.pnpm/@2060.io+ffi-napi@4.0.9/node_modules/@2060.io/ffi-napi/lib/callback.js:66:27)