Contribution

• I'd be willing to implement this feature (contributing guide)

Describe the user story

At the moment, pnpm link seems to be totally broken, both in v9 and v10. I might report that later, but the fact is that local development of npm packages has always been a complete pain IMO.

The npm link workflow never made sense for me in the first place, and even when it works, it doesn't behave 100% like when consuming a published package. Sometimes, running pnpm pack and adding an explicit file: reference to the tarball in the consuming project might work, but then you make an update to the tarball and the changes are not picked up, checksums are all wrong etc etc.

Describe the solution you'd like

Why can't there be a command that publishes a package to the local pnpm store only, exactly as if it had first been published to npm and then cached? Then the consuming dev projects could just reference the unpublished versions and not even know the package is not on npm yet. Maybe a warning that the package is unpublished could be shown, but that's all.

Describe the drawbacks of your solution

Assuming there is a warning when consuming an unpublished package, exactly zero.

Describe alternatives you've considered

pnpm link, pnpm pack