Running forks of NPM modules in prod, and collabing with upstream

[jaredp]

bun patch is directionally great for running forks of npm pacakges in prod. However, my understanding is it lets you edit the built artifacts, rather than the package's source. This makes it hard to send a PR to upstream.

I'd love to run more forks of my npm packages and contribute upstream. Today the tooling makes this hard— I really have no idea the right way to do it; maybe git submodules?

When I worked around Linux at FB there was a phenomenal culture of every (big) company running their own fork of Linux. The expectation was each co would make changes for themselves, run long running forks, and contribute to upstream over the course of months. The upstream would accept changes after lengthy discussions using eg. FB's experience running the forked code in prod. In the meantime, FB was set up to run their own fork in prod, pull from upstream, and not wait for upstream to accept changes.

I'd love to see this culture on NPM packages! My understanding is there's no great way to do this today. Bun's in a great position to make it happen.

What can I do to start the conversation?

[hubdidub]

The way I understand it, bun patch is for situations when you want to do small modifications to a dependency without having to fork the entire repository, which can be cumbersome (there might be build steps etc.)
And if you want to contribute to a repository, you should better fork it instead of using bun patch.

You can use that fork to contribute to the original repository, or you can use it directly in your project, without even publishing it to NPM, see https://bun.sh/docs/cli/install#non-npm-dependencies, then it's similar to patching with Bun.