Decide a ReferenceType's package name by looking for a package.json file

[bodil]

The current mechanism by which a ReferenceType figures out which package the type came from is by parsing the path and taking the first path element following node_modules. This breaks when using pnpm which builds a symlink tree into a .pnpm folder inside node_modules, so every ReferenceType comes out .pnpm. It also breaks if you're linking into a different project inside a monorepo, where there's no node_modules on the source path.

The most immediate consequence of this is that plugins which resolve external links such as typedoc-plugin-mdn-links silently fail to do anything when using pnpm.

This patch walks up the directory tree looking for a package.json file and grabbing the package name from its name key rather than trying to guess it from the file path, which solves the issues mentioned above.

[Gerrit0]

Looking at https://pnpm.io/symlinked-node-modules-structure... would an alternative, much less IO expensive, fix be to switch the indexOf("node_modules") to lastIndexOf("node_modules")?

[bodil]

That was my first attempt at a fix, which solves the problem of linking into the symlink farm, but not cross project links which won't have node_modules in their path at all. Looking at it again with performance in mind, it would be better to try lastIndexOf first, and look for a package.json only if that gives no result. It's probably worth caching the package.json lookups too.

[bodil]

I've implemented the above, how does this look?

[Gerrit0]

I missed the cross project links mention in your original post - I'm probably missing something... not familiar with pnpm, but why would those not have node_modules? Are they not actually normal dependencies? package isn't meant to be set for references which aren't from a dependency.

[bodil]

In pnpm monorepo setups, you can list a package as a dependency of another package inside the monorepo workspace, and you'll get a symlink in node_modules to its actual location in the workspace, so assuming symlinks are being resolved you won't have node_modules in the dependency's path.

[Gerrit0]

Hmmm.... that's a thorny problem then. The test failures are real failures because the patch is inappropriately setting the package property on all reference types. I'm going to try setting up a pnpm setup and see if there's a better way to do this...

[Gerrit0]

... I might need to change the definition of ReferenceType.package, not happy about it, but... going to think about this some more.

[Gerrit0]

Yeah, I'm convinced ReferenceType.package should (almost) always be set. This is a pretty major breaking change, so it's going to have to be a part of 0.24 though.