Suggestion: Pinned dependencies should be transitive

[LoganGrier]

I'm not sure whether this is a bug. I'm wording this issue like a feature request instead of a bug report since transitivity isn't specified in the pinned-dependency docs.

Current Behavior

Right now, pinned dependencies are not transitive: if c is a pinned dependency of b and b is a pinned dependency of a, then c is not necessarily a pinned dependency of a. This means that if c is not explicitly marked as a pinned dependency of a, then when a is rebuilt, all dev files in c are deleted.

Suggested Behavior

When a is built, dev files in c should also be build since c is a transitive pinned dependency of a through b.

Motivation

1. Non-transitivity is unintuitive. Dependencies, including the dependencies and dev-dependencies in bsconfig and package.json, are almost always transitive.
2. Non-transitivity makes building and testing code more complicated. When testing packages in a mono-repo, its common to build and test all packages in the repo using commands like yarn workspaces foreach run build && yarn workspaces foreach --parallel run test. For those not familiar with yarn, the command yarn workspaces foreach run [script] runs the given script on each project in a workspace in arbitrary order. To build and test a monorepo that uses rescript, you have two options:
   1. Build projects in topological order (yarn workspaces foreach --topological-dev run build-test). Since rescript build isn't thread-safe, the command above can't be run with the --parallel option.
   2. Create a phony project that depends on all other projects and build it before testing (cd phony-project && yarn build && cd top && yarn workspaces foreach --parallel run test). This approach becomes more complicated when non-ReScript packages are in the same monorepo as ReScript packages.

[cristianoc]

You can take a look at the logic around here

https://github.com/rescript-lang/rescript-compiler/blob/master/jscomp/bsb/bsb_config_parse.ml#L305

[PlabanJr]

did you find any solution here ? i am facing the same.

[DZakh]

Did you try https://github.com/teamwalnut/rewatch?

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[zth]

I believe Rewatch, the new build system, solves this. Feel free to reopen if not.