Description
(Continuing from #3123, as the current issues in the referenced reproduction case are a different problem.)
Re: https://github.com/ioBroker/ioBroker.js-controller
Running this command:
npm i ioBroker/ioBroker.js-controller
in an empty project raises several issues related to Link deps that don't have targets at the time that rebuild and calcDepFlags are run. It seems like this is a simple matter of adding some checks in Arborist to guard against a Link node that doesn't have a target. (Alternatively, we need to make Link objects have a fallback so that link.target will refer to the link itself, like it does for Node objects. If we go that route, we have some node.isLink checks which then recurse to the node.target and will cause infinite loops, so that will have to be guarded against instead. Not sure offhand which is the less complex/dangerous approach.)
Once the checks are added, however, the story gets even more interesting.
Running npm i ioBroker/ioBroker.js-controller seems to work. Running npm i ioBroker/ioBroker.js-controller a second time, works again. Running npm i ioBroker/ioBroker.js-controller a third time fails horribly, with many packages not being found.
My suspicion is that this is related to the issue highlighted in npm/arborist#299, where lifecycle scripts of locally linked dependencies are not run on first install.
Posted here because I'm not 100% sure this is an Arborist issue, but once it has been root caused, it seems like a good idea to post an issue over on https://github.com/npm/arborist with a more in-the-weeds description and fix.