The intent behind "*" was for us to avoid accidentally declaring multiple versions in multiple packages. We had a few issues with this where we'd bump a semver range in one package and due to lockfile pinning the other package didn't get the new version and we'd have multiple versions in our repo until we deleted the lockfile or ran yarn-deduplicate.

We would declare one version in the root and then use * in the packages and then the package managers pick the root version to satisfy both.

Pnpm has catalogs to solve this -- https://pnpm.io/catalogs -- so we'd just be able to do eg "make-dir": "catalog:" and it'd use the shared root version.

But it looks like yarn2 doesn't have a catalogs feature -- yarnpkg/berry#6400

@bradzacher https://github.com/toss/yarn-plugin-catalogs can be used in this case?

We would declare one version in the root and then use * in the packages and then the package managers pick the root version to satisfy both.

makr-dir is not declared in the root package.json?

It would have been declared in the root at one point! But we removed it at some point.

That was the danger with this style. Really no matter what you did you had danger of out-of-sync deps.

We could use that plugin if it supports the same syntax as pnpm! That would be hugely valuable!

@bradzacher Should I raise two PRs or one which uses yarn-plugin-catalogs instead?