workspaces!

[zkat]

We should support some kind of workspaces.

I really like the idea of basically basing these on how Cargo works:

1. "Virtual Workspaces" can be created by having a blank toplevel project and a bunch of same-level packages.
2. "Hierarchical Workspace" can be created by having a "primary" package at the root, and a bunch of its "dependencies" in workspace directories.
3. important: I really really want to have workspace-level dependency versions, so you can specify a dependency version once, in your workspace definition, and just do something like "dependencies": { "my-dep": "workspace" }
4. I'm not sure I care enough about compatibility with NPM workspaces.

Some inspiration on design:

1. Turborepo: https://turbo.build/repo/docs/core-concepts/monorepos/running-tasks
2. pnpm workspaces: https://pnpm.io/workspaces
3. bit: https://bit.dev/blog/painless-monorepo-dependency-management-with-bit-l4f9fzyw/
4. cargo workspaces: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch14-03-cargo-workspaces.html
5. wireit: https://github.com/google/wireit

Annoyingly, there's a lot of inconsistencies as to what's called "workspaces", and what the host project is called:

1. Cargo refers to the host project as a workspace, and its children as members, but they're referred to on the CLI with the -p/--package flag.
2. PNPM has a pnpm-workspace.yaml file with a packages: field, and uses -r/--recursive to run certain commands across all workspace packages. It uses the -w/--workspace flag to refer to the host/root project.
3. NPM uses a "workspaces": {...} field and seems to refer to the host project as a "root project" or "project root". The -w/--workspace flag, as opposed to in NPM, refers to the individual packages, not the root project.
4. Yarn also uses a "workspaces": {...} field, which is probably the source of NPM's naming, but refers to the host project as a "worktree". It does not seem to have any configuration for either recursive execution (like PNPM) or package targeting (like Cargo or NPM).

So basically everyone is horrible and there's no right answer.

I personally like PNPM's approach the best because it's the clearest and most consistent.

[ThatOneCalculator]

Support for pnpm workspaces would be amazing, I use them for most of my big projects :)

[spa5k]

any progress on it?

[zkat]

Not yet, no. I’m working on fixing some other stuff first