proposal: Allow setting to use & respect user .npmrc config to fix language server installation issues

[jamischarles]

Problem Statement

npm-based language servers fail to install with non-standard npm setups. ie: custom registry, self-signed certs etc. This affects eslint, prettier, etc.

Solution Proposal

Provide a setting to specify location of .npmrc to use with --userconfig flag

Pros

• Allows users to manually override zed to respect their global .npmrc settings which help set CA files, custom registry details etc
• Use that instead of the blank npmrc that's being force overridden in the node runtime

Cons

• users may expect global .npmrc to already be respected.

In this case IMO the pro far outweighs the con because there's no easy override (as far as I can tell)

Open Questions

I spent a few hours last night building Zed on macOS and was finally able to manually override this in the code.

Big questions I have remaining:

1. I can see that npmrc is completely being ignored right now. The PR that added this doesn't provide much context on the reason. Am I reading that code right? That it's intentionally overriding --userconfig with a blank file?

Related Issues

#19806
#9422
#8650

[jamischarles]

Or would it be better to just allow people to opt-out of the ignore user npmrc behavior that's currently the default?