- Start Date: 2016-10-12
- RFC PR:
- Yarn Issue:
Add symlink link: dependency type to enable complex cross-project development
workflows.
This RFC is a spinoff of yarn's issue #884.
We've been using some kind of monorepo approach for our projects for quite some time, a bit like lerna but with a more private and nested approach (our packages aren't expected to be published for now) along some specific needs: we must to link some public dependencies (eg. mongoose) that must be the exact same instance accross our subpackages (otherwise you encounter a lot of exotic bugs, edge cases), we also link our devDeps (they are shared accross all our subpackages).
At first we used linklocal with npm@2,
leveraging a custom use of the file: prefix (basically just symlinking them),
but npm@3 broke a lot of things related to their handling (eg.
#10343). We ended up moving to
ied where we implemented the file:
prefix handling using simple symlinks, that tackled our need.
I would love to be able to switch theses project to yarn but I would need a way to create these links.
npm is also considering to add the same link: specifier, see this recent RFC.
We Add a new link: specifier that would just create symlinks and that's it
(regardless of destination's existence)
I've already implemented the changes in yarn's pr#1109 and I'm currently maintaining a fork since my team already rely on this for several projects.
I think link: is pretty explicit, an update to the docs/cli-help should be
enough.
Not sure how exactly cross-platform symlinks are today. However it looks like Microsoft might be catching up on this issue.
Beside the two alternatives exposed above, I can't think of anything else for now.
Drawback of not implementing this is that we restrict how creative developers can be with complex multi-packages workflows.
Not sure how we should handle actually publishing packages with such
dependencies, the existing behavior for file: types?