PackageEvents vs ScriptEvents

[nesl247]

I'm currently looking into why cweagans/composer-patches#273 was occurring because it's causing problems in a new application I'm developing. As mentioned there, it's very common for --no-scripts to be used in a Dockerfile because it allows caching of the dependency installation, separate from running the post-update-cmd and post-install-cmd scripts that Symfony makes use of.

I don't know the inner workings of Composer a ton, but I do see that there are two different event const enum classes: PackageEvents and ScriptEvents.

From what I can tell, composer-patches makes use of PackageEvents, which to me should be triggered regardless of --no-scripts, because it's a PackageEvent, not a ScriptEvent.

What is the actual distinction between the two? If none, is there any purpose for both? Is there a reason that PackageEvents aren't triggered regardless of $runScripts being true here?:

composer/src/Composer/Installer/InstallationManager.php

Line 439 in d17c724

if (null !== $eventName && $runScripts && $this->eventDispatcher) {

[nesl247]

I was able to solve the issue I was having by making sure cweagans/composer-patches was added to require but symplify/vendor-patches in require-dev. Previously I had only installed composer-patches via the simplify/vendor-patches library as a dependency.

I unfortunately have no way to delete this question, so I'll mark this as answered after this comment if possible (GitHub Discussions limitation).