Problems building with globals

[idleberg]

I'm in the process of replacing my old tsup projects to use tsdown instead. Among them are some extensions for Pulsar, a community-driven version of GitHub's former Atom editor. Pulsar is special since it's super-outdated, 10 versions behind the latest NodeJS and 28 (!) behind the latest Electron. While I have long abandoned using Atom or Pulsar, I still like to do maintaince for my own extensions, preferably using the same setup I use for my modern projects.

Here's the issue. Using tsdown migrate seemed to be sufficient, it gave me the following config:

import { defineConfig } from 'tsup';

export default defineConfig({
	bundle: true,
	clean: true,
	dts: true,
	entry: ['src/main.ts'],
	external: ['atom', 'electron'],
	format: 'cjs',
	minify: true,
	outDir: 'lib',
	platform: 'node',
	target: 'node14',
	treeshake: true,

	// my only manual edit
	nodeProtocol: false,
});

Building works fine, but I'm getting errors at runtime whenever I'm accessing the global atom object (e.g. TypeError: _atom.inDevMode is not a function). I tried out several combinations of external and noExternal, but to no avail. I'm not sure if this is something I can fix or whether I should report a bug. It's not a big deal either, so I'd understand if this is not worth looking into 😉

[sxzz]

Could be a bug, please report it with minimum reproduction.