Goal

It should be possible to use the file: and link: protocols in for a pnpm catalog entry.

# pnpm-workspace.yaml
packages:
  - packages/*

catalog:
  test-pkg: file:./tarballs/test-pkg-1.0.0.tgz

{
  "dependencies": {
    "test-pkg": "catalog:"
  }
}

Today this errors on pnpm install.

❯ pnpm install
Scope: all 1 workspace projects
 ERR_PNPM_CATALOG_ENTRY_INVALID_SPEC  The entry for 'test-pkg' in catalog 'default' declares a dependency using the 'file' protocol. This is not yet supported, but may be in a future version of pnpm.

Support for this was intentionally punted for the initial pnpm catalogs release, but we should go back and add support for this.

Challenges

The file: and link: paths should be interpreted relative to pnpm-workspace.yaml, but there may be transformation of these paths needed when resolving them in a workspace package, which will mostly likely be in a different directory (e.g. packages/foo).