patch-package should support patching itself in `postinstall` script

patch-package is great, so much so that I recently found myself attempting to use it to patch patch-package itself as I came across issue #201. It didn’t work, at least in my setup, using "postinstall": "patch-package" in the package.json file. What I think was happening is that by the time patch-package had patched itself, it was too late – the old unpatched code was already being used to patch other packages.

Perhaps the solution might be for patch-package to detect if one of the patch files is for patch-package itself, and if so, apply that patch first, then re-exec itself before continuing with other patches. (When re-exec’ing, perhaps add a command-line option like --no-self-patch to prevent patching itself in a loop.) 😃

[pdcastro]

@mikehardy, great suggestion! I wasn’t aware of the --patch-dir option: it is not documented by npx patch-package --help, but indeed it is in the source code. I’ve successfully “solved” issue #201 in my project thanks to your tip. 👍

[mikehardy]

Mine all mine, precious internet points https://github.com/ds300/patch-package/pull/225 Cheers 😃