Are peer dependency install incorrectly?

[unional]

Say a package pkg-a has this package.json:

{
  "name": "pkg-a",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "peerDependencies": {
    "pkg-b": "^1.0.0"
  }
}

When installing pkg-a, pnpm yields:

node_modules
  .pnpm
    [email protected]...
      pkg-b # link to `.pnpm/[email protected]...`
    [email protected]...
  pkg-a # link to `.pnpm/[email protected]...`

i.e. import 'pkg-b' will fail.
On one hand, this is correct because the project didn't install pkg-b directly.

But on the other hand, this is wrong because pkg-b supposed to be a "peer" of pkg-a. That's what pkg-a expects thus declaring pkg-b as a peer dependency instead of a regular dependency.

This become an issue when a plugin tells the plugin host to load another plugin.

Examples of plugin host: vite, storybook.

Right now, the consuming project needs to install the peerDependencies in pkg-a manually in order for the plugin host (vite or storybook) to load the plugins correctly.
i.e., the auto-peers-install is not "working".

Cross linking the discussion on storybook:
storybookjs/storybook#29692

[zkochan]

pkg-b is not a dependency of your project, so it isn't in the root of node_modules. If you need access to pkg-b you should install it as a direct dependency of the project where you want to import it. auto-install-peers works because as you have shown in your example, it is linked to pkg-a. If you will install it as a regular dependency, it won't be duplicated, the peer will be resolved from the version that you installed.

[unional]

So does to mean that if the consuming project wants to install the dependencies as pkg-a intended, it should:

• set auto-install-peers to false
• set strict-peer-dependencies to true
• install all peer dependencies manually

The current way of installing those peer dependencies is not how peer dependencies meant to be installed, IMO.

At the same time, I do understand that this is more like a workaround/helping features that will cover some (common?) cases, while avoid monkeying user's package.json.

The documentation didn't get into these details giving the impression that "it will just work".