Support overriding binary linking

[ExE-Boss]

webpack has three CLI implementations, the modern webpack‑command, the original webpack‑cli (which used to be part of webpack before version 4) and the now bare‑bones one that comes built‑in with webpack.

In this case, it’s preferred to use either webpack‑command or webpack‑cli over the built‑in one, but pnpm doesn’t provide any way to override which webpack CLI implementation is used.

[zkochan]

We probably have to come up with some declarative way to configure this. Optional peers are introducing a new field, "*Meta". Maybe we can use something like this:

"devDependencies": {
  "webpack": "^4.28.2",
  "webpack-command": "^0.4.2"
},
"devDependenciesMeta": {
  "webpack": {
    "bin": false
  }
}

cc @arcanis

[ExE-Boss]

That could probably also work for #1580.

[arcanis]

That's interesting, I wondered in the past whether this case happened in the wild - two conflicting binaries by two different packages. Well, now it apparently does 😄

I'd probably name this field something like linkBin (bin sounds a bit too generic), but I wonder if maybe that's not a bug that should be solved by webpack ... as far as I know the behavior is currently unspecified, so it's no wonder it doesn't work really well everywhere. For all we know it could even work in npm only because of how the filesystem sort the results of readdir 😕

cc @sokra

[sokra]

All these package export different named binaries. i. e. the binary of webpack-cli is registered on the webpack-cli name. There is no conflict.

[ExE-Boss]

I also encountered this with gulp and gulp‑cli.

[zkochan]

I created an RFC at Yarn for the linkBin feature.

yarnpkg/rfcs#118

[milahu]

another collision:
the binary react-native is provided by react-native and @react-native-community/cli

for example in manyverse

{
  "name": "manyverse",
  "version": "0.2307.3-beta",
  "dependencies": {
    "react-native": "0.66.5"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@react-native-community/cli": "~6.4.0"
  }
}

surprise: npm and pnpm produce different results:

npm prefers @react-native-community/cli

$ npm install
$ readlink node_modules/.bin/react-native
../@react-native-community/cli/build/bin.js

pnpm prefers react-native

$ pnpm install
$ grep "exec node" node_modules/.bin/react-native 
  exec node  "$basedir/../react-native/cli.js" "$@"

both npm and pnpm show no warning for the collision

expected pnpm warning

 WARN  Issues with node_modules/.bin found
- node_modules/.bin/react-native is provided by multiple packages, currently using react-native
   - react-native
   - @react-native-community/cli
hint: to prefer different packages, modify dependenciesMeta in package.json