wip: treat links with installLinks set as Links not Nodes

[nlf]

No description provided.

[lukekarrys]

@nlf After #5824 landed, I added a smoke test for this issue that I pushed to this PR (plus a commented out idea that may be nothing).

[cascornelissen]

@lukekarrys, I honestly hate to be this person but I was wondering if there's anything we can do to help move this forward? We're stuck on npm 8 because of this issue but would love to start using some neat features that became available in v9.

We have about 15 developers working on 40+ repositories so the workaround mentioned in in #5844 isn't really working out for us. Again, no pressure, we're just interested in an update since it's been a few months ❤️

[lukekarrys]

@cascornelissen Thanks for reaching out and offering help. Unfortunately, this ended up being a tricky bug to fix and the proposed WIP fix in this PR ended up causing other bugs. We still consider this Priority 0 bug so it is at the top of our list to fix, but we've been prioritizing some feature work lately. We do intend to fix it (and fix it correctly) but I can't give a timeline for that.

We have about 15 developers working on 40+ repositories so the workaround mentioned in in #5844 isn't really working out for us.

And to follow up on this specific, the commands I wrote for that workaround were targeted to individual projects but it should be possible to get the end result at scale. The end goal is for each project to have a root level .npmrc file like the one below. Any way that you want to accomplish getting that file in place will work and npm will read it.

.npmrc

install-links=false

Apologies if you've already tried that, but if you really want to use npm@9 that's the easiest way for now.

[cascornelissen]

Thanks for the update @lukekarrys, good to hear this issue wasn't lost somehow.

With regards to the .npmrc approach, we've compared the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and it's too much work for us for the advantages we might get out of it. Especially because we'll have to clean it up again as well once the issue is fixed in npm@9. We've also thought about getting every developer to set it in their global .npmrc but that's even harder to keep track of and we want to ensure everyone has a matching setup.

We'll stick with npm@8 for a while longer. The features in npm@9 are (really-)nice-to-haves for us right now. Looking forward to seeing this issue resolved, but take the time to do so! ❤️