NPM and package.json weirdness

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#250 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
node.js
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Reproduce the package1 → package2 → package3 → helloworld dependency chain using the npm publish and npm update steps described in the issue. Inspect the generated package.json files and compare dependency versions before and after updating; done means the cause of the stale transitive version is documented or corrected and the update behavior is verified.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Something weird is going on with NPM and how package.json files work.

Suppose I have a package called package1 which is required by a package called package2, which in turn is required by package3 which is required by an app called helloworld, which only requires package3.

Okay, so I make a change to package1, npm publish the new version, and go to the directory that contains helloworld and npm update it.

You'd think that we'd get the new version of package1 but we don't. The only way to get it to update that I've discovered is to make a change to package3, publish it, and then npm update. But nothing changed in package3, why should I have to rebuild it just to get the change in package1 reflected in the app.

I have a feeling that this is because NPM modifies the package.json that NPM passes up the chain of require's? I swear this used to work, and what a pain in the ass if this is the only way to get changes deep in the stack reflected at the top.

Dominant language
HTML
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134
Forks
10
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