Add a flag to disable computing full configurations

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

🚀 Feature Request

Some configurations, particularly those for monorepos, don't need to compute the full/extended config for a conversion. Their configurations might exist solely to modify a few choice rules from an extended shared config.

{
  "extends": "@org/eslint-config",
  "rules": {
    "specific-rule": "error"
  }
}

Existing Behavior

There's no way to change the behavior of rule conversions to ignore extended configurations.

Change Proposal

How about a --standalone flag / standalone Node API (once #732 is resolved) to disable fetching and computing the --print-config and extends rules for lint configurations? Is there a better name for the flag?

In the above example, instead of factoring in @org/eslint-config, we'd only look at rules -> specific-rule.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

@JamesHenry it'd be good, too, to know if this should change how the lint configurations for workspaces are printed out. E.g. should we skip adding in any "extends", "plugins", etc. metadata other than "rules"?

[JamesHenry]

Hmm yeah I guess in my monorepo use-case a nested project/package config could extend other unique things that you would want to take into account...

So maybe rather than a flag, what we what is to be able to specify particular paths within extends that should be ignored for a particular config. The outer tooling can figure out the path to the root config and instruct the library to ignore any extends references to that?

I don’t think skipping plugins etc would be part of my use-case, we would want to always consider those

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Super interesting. Are there any workspaces/configs you could post as examples @JamesHenry?

[JamesHenry]

Great to catch up with you today - as briefly mentioned on slack after our call, I think I personally no longer need this in light of the changes we discussed to the available Node APIs - I will be able to customize the extends however I need to before ever passing it to the library!

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

If anybody is still interested in this, comment below and we can re-open!