whack link appears to symlink

[peterp]

It appears that whackage creates a symlink just like npm link does.

> whack init
> whack link ../my-react-native-library
[whackage] Package my-react-native-library is not a registered dependency in my-app

I add "my-react-native-library": "0.0.1" to packages.json dependencies and try again

> whack link ../my-react-native-library

This works now, and packages.json dependency is now: "my-react-native-library": "file:../my-react-native-library"

> whack run start
[whackage] Package my-react-native-library appears to be symlinked. Overwriting symlinks is not currently supported. Unlink package and try again.

node v8.1.3
npm 5.1.0

[jevakallio]

I don't think there is any way whackage is doing the symlinking.

It is however possible that the isNotSymlinked check is returning a false negative, or that you have a preexisting symlink from some previous attempt to solve the problem?

I'm also fairly sure that whackage should not modify your package.json - though it's been a long time since I worked on this, so I could be wrong about that.

[peterp]

I was using npm install ../relativepath beforehand, so I changed the name and location of my package to see if it was a cached issue.

> ls -al node_modules/chatterview2
ls: node_modules/chatterview2: No such file or directory
> whack link ../chatterview2/
> linked chatterview2 -> /Users/peterp/Personal/chatterview2
> ls -al node_modules/chatterview2
lrwxr-xr-x  1 peterp  staff  18 Jul  6 15:36 node_modules/chatterview2 -> ../../chatterview2

afaik npm install ../relative-path updates the package's dependencies and creates a symlink, which it appears what link is doing here:

whackage/src/commands/link.js

Line 24 in 0ca1cfd

spawn('npm', ['install', relativePath], (code) => {

Perhaps that wasn't true awhile back?

[jevakallio]

Ah, you must be using npm 5! According to the npm5 release notes, both of these are actually perfectly logical issues:

• npm install ./packages/subdir will now create a symlink instead of a regular installation
• npm will --save by default now.

Unfortunately that means that whackage is currently not npm 5 compatible. If you want to figure out how to solve this, pull requests are welcome. I am currently busy with other work and travelling, don't expect to get to this for at least a few weeks.

[peterp]

A quick glance at the React Native repo is showing that there's a bunch of problems with npm 5 and react-native, so I'm downgrading to npm 4:

npm install -g npm@latest-4

For anyone tackling the npm 5 issue: There is a flag to disable the automatic saving in packages.json --no-save, but I don't think it's possible to disable the symlinks.

[jpdriver]

related: #17

[peterp]

@jpdriver I've started using haul whilst building local packages, it handles symlinks rather easily. You don't need to add the build steps to gradle/ xcode

[jevakallio]

@peterp Haul is great, glad it's working out for you.

In the meantime, I just released whackage 1.2.0 with NPM 5 support https://github.com/FormidableLabs/whackage/releases/tag/v1.2.0

Closing this issue now, feel free to message to reopen if needed!