Editing dependent packages, new approach?

[mighdoll]

I often have to fix a bug in an external package. The basic approach is to edit my package to reference a local copy of the external package. Then rebuild, refresh and test. At least I’d like it to be that easy.

But as far as I know, it’s not so easy. At least not with one additional constraint to the scenario. Let’s say that my package and the external package both depend on one or more grandchild packages. Duplicating a grandchild package at runtime is unsafe, odd things fail if two copies are resolved.

There are three ways I know of to reference the local copy of the external package. link:../local-copy, workspace:* (adding ../local-copy to pnpm-workspace.yaml, or file:../local-copy. link: and workspace: don’t work, multiple copies of the grandchild packages appear at runtime. pnpm.overrides on the grandchild doesn’t fix the duplication (and it would be error prone.)

file:../local-copy works, but only once. After editing the local copy, and rebuilding it, changes are not picked up in my package's resolution path, even after pnpm update or pnpm install. pnpm install –force works, but that takes a really long time to run when unrelated packages have long install scripts.

So my current approach is something like this:

1. edit my package.json pnpm.overrides to change the external package to a 'file: dependency.
2. edit external package, pnpm prepublish in external package
3. re-edit pnpm.overrides to introduce a typo into file: dependency
4. pnpm i
5. re-edit pnpm.overrides to fix the typo
6. pnpm i
7. test change. If it doesn't work, redo installation to distinguish installation error from development bug...

Is there a better way?

If not, could pnpm i always check whether the file: dependency is outdated on disk? Or could we add an option to do so, e.g. pnpm i –force-file-dependencies?