Suggestion: migrate to monorepo tooling

[moreal]

Summary

While working on CI-related tasks recently, I realized that we need to better understand the dependency relationships between tasks across each project and organize them to execute tasks more intelligently. By "intelligently," I mean ensuring that duplicate tasks are executed only once.

Currently, pnpm does not support attributes like depends, making it structurally impossible to determine which tasks depend on others or identify overlapping tasks.

On the other hand, mise does support this feature. However, since most tasks simply call scripts specified in the scripts field of package.json, more granular optimization remains difficult from mise's perspective as well.

Additionally, while mise run install in setup-mise runs the build as a prerequisite, the issue of re-running the build in subsequent executions remains challenging due to the lack of build caching functionality that monorepo tools typically provide.

I have submitted several PRs to address these issues, but they were resolved awkwardly by adding various flags, which I consider to be a temporary workaround. Therefore, I would like to propose two approaches to fundamentally solve this problem.

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1. Migrate scripts to mise tasks and use pnpm solely as a package manager

Migrate all pnpm scripts to mise tasks and express the dependencies between them. This would resolve the issue where pnpm could not properly express dependencies between scripts.

2. Introduce a monorepo tool (e.g., Turborepo)

Further investigation into monorepo tools is needed, but if the repository will continue to operate exclusively within the JavaScript ecosystem as it does now, tools like Turborepo or Nx appear to be viable options. These tools not only resolve dependency issues between tasks but also provide build caching. This would prevent the issue where builds are repeated even though they were already executed in setup-mise. Furthermore, this is expected to help reduce build times by ensuring that only the necessary builds are re-executed.

Affected Area

CI/CD pipeline and task orchestration - specifically pnpm scripts, mise task configuration, and build process optimization

Reason / Context

I already mentioned it in the Summary section.

Checklist

1. Make a decision whether to migrate or not.
2. Research which monorepo tool is best for this repository if we decided to monorepo tool.
3. Make a PR.

Related issues

• Optimize CI/CD pipeline with workspace-detector for changed packages #524 seems related.

[dahlia]

Thanks for bringing this up! I've been looking into monorepo tooling options, and I'd like to suggest considering moon as a potential solution.

Why moon might be a good fit for Fedify

1. Multi-runtime support — moon has Tier 3 support for Deno, Node.js, and Bun, which aligns perfectly with Fedify's multi-runtime architecture
2. Works with pnpm — moon doesn't replace pnpm; it works alongside it as a build orchestrator
3. Build caching — Provides intelligent caching to avoid redundant builds
4. Task dependency management — Automatically infers dependencies from package.json and manages task execution order
5. Task inheritance — Allows defining tasks once globally instead of repeating them in every package

Current state

moon v2 is currently at RC (Release Candidate) stage as of January 27, 2026. While not yet stable, it's much more mature than alpha/beta.

How it would work with mise

• mise — Development environment setup (managing tool versions)
• moon — Build orchestration and task running (with caching)
• pnpm — Package management (as it is now)

Alternative

If we prefer to stick with tools we already have, Option 1 (migrating to mise tasks) is still viable, though we'd lose build caching benefits.

I think moon is worth investigating further, especially given its Deno support. Would you like me to create a proof-of-concept with a few packages to evaluate the performance improvements?