Why is webpack/replace necessary?

[sseppola]

I don't understand what these do, and why they are necessary. Is there a discussion around why they were built somewhere?

[jhen0409]

The webpack/replace it do two things:

1. if modules couldn't be hot updated, we need full reload, but it's inconvenient for Chrome Extension, so we call chrome.runtime.reload. (log-apply-result.js#L16-L21, origin: hot/log-apply-result.js)
2. The script tag have problem in Content Scripts page, because it‘s no way to get webpackHotUpdate function (in a different context), so we eval code to fix it. (JsonpMainTemplate.runtime.js#L12-L26, origin: lib/JsonpMainTemplate.runtime.js#L12-L19)

[sseppola]

I think you switched up the references to JsonpMainTemplate and log-apply-result between point 1 and 2 as eval is used in 1 and reload in 2. Thank you for explaining, while reading the code there's one thing that sticks out:

Why is hotDownloadUpdateChunk defined on the context object instead of declaring a function like in the original? The original does not really make sense as the function is never used, however I've noticed other files in the webpack repo seem to use hotDownloadUpdateChunk as a global function. If you don't mind, how does that work?

[develra]

Thanks for the explanation.