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when should shims of third-party binaries resolve to local dependencies?

Open dherman opened this issue 6 years ago • 2 comments

My original design was that shims for third-party binaries would always resolve to a local dependency if it's present (similar to how npx and other tools work). My intuition was that I never want a global binary if there's a local one available. In conversation with @stefanpenner he suggested that this might lead to surprises where you thought you were calling a global tool and didn't know that a local project had overridden it.

So a few alternatives would be:

  1. Local binaries always win
  2. Local binaries from direct dependencies (not transitive dependencies) always win
  3. Local binaries only win when explicitly opted in through a configuration entry in the project's Notion config (e.g., "bin": ["gulp", "tsc", "eslint"])

ISTM (1) is a non-starter -- I really don't think anyone wants a transitive dependency's binaries to be there, and in fact npm is considering incompatibly changing that behavior in a future version of npm. (This is especially egregious if a transitive dependency depends on npm itself!)

So I think it's really between options (2) and (3).

dherman avatar May 31 '18 18:05 dherman