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Last active July 30, 2024 13:59
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How package managers dealing with binaries from transitive dependencies
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node-pm-globals.md 
$pm add vite

# should be success
$pm run vite --version

# shoud be fail
$pm run esbuild --version

vite has 4 transitive binaries vite, rollup, esbuild and nanoid.

A user expects only vite available when installing vite using package manager. (especially when installing for global $PATH) However, its behavior is vary

  • NPM downloads all of them into node_modules/.bin and link all of them to project / $PATH
  • Yarn downloads all of them into node_modules/.bin but link only vite in the project / $PATH
  • pnpm downloads only vite into node_modules/bin, and link only vite in the project / $PATH
  • Bun downloads all of them into node_moudles/.bin, and link all of them to proejct / $PATH

Due to its behavior, NPM and Bun is not good for managing global installations. It could be a security risk (supply chain attacks) and it can bloats the completions on shell environment.

@rafaeleyng
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Thanks! 👍

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