Feature request: flatten git clones in current directory, and build node_modules tree with links

[thomas-riccardi]

It would be great to have an option to get all git clone repositories done in the current directory, instead of somewhere down the dependency tree.
This way we would have a nice development environment with deduped dependencies, and to make things still work at runtime, use symbolic links to keep the node_modules tree working.

To implement the links either we do it manually, or we can hopefully re-use npm link and force a prefix.

Limitations: the deduping is great until some modules depend on the same cloned module but with incompatible versions. Let's ignore this for now.
How does gpm currently handles clones for versions ? I haven't found code that checkouts the version compatible with what the parent asked (and I don't know how to implement that without assuming some sort of publish/tagging convention, which will necessarily not work in all cases)

[IonicaBizau]

I think we can safely add an option (--flatten or so) that will install the the dependencies in the node_modules, like npm@3 does. Is this what you want? 💭

How does gpm currently handles clones for versions?

It doesn't do that at all. At least, that wasn't my goal when I coded it. I always want to get the most recent state of the repos.

Contributions welcome! ❇️

[thomas-riccardi]

My goal is to have this:

$ mkdir dev && cd dev
$ gpm -i my-main-module --flatten
$ ls
my-main-module
my-dependency
my-sub-dependency
$ gpm -i my-second-main-module --flatten
$ ls
my-main-module
my-dependency
my-sub-dependency
my-second-main-module
my-second-dependency
...

Where some dependencies are shared between the two main modules.

Having the dependencies in node_modules, even flattened, would not be enough for me: it wouldn't dedupe between the multiple main modules. Also, it's less user friendly to have code to edit in a sub-directory.

That's why I proposed the solution with the symlinks.

For dependency version constraints, ok, let's ignore the potential issues for now, it matches our use cases !

[IonicaBizau]

But then, since they are in the same directory, if my-main-module requires another dependency, I guess it will throw an error (since it doesn't contain the node_modules dir). Didn't test, tho. 💭

[isysd-mirror]

I made a PR #29 to at least partially address this with gpm. The symlinks can be created by using relative file paths in package.json. For a full example, see this isomorphic module boilerplate. I also wrote an article (w/ gpm shout out) explaining how it works.