Validations fail when importing artifact from external package

Description

When I import a Hardhat artifact from an external package, the OpenZeppelin upgrades plugin does not make the deployment because it fails to validate the cache. But there is no cache to validate because I am not compiling that contract locally.

The solution would be to let us disable the cache validation via a flag, so that we can use @openzeppelin/hardhat-upgrades with external Hardhat artifacts.

Error

ValidationsCacheNotFound [Error]: Validations cache not found. Recompile with `hardhat compile --force`
    at Object.readValidations (/Users/paulrberg/workspace/hifi/deployers/node_modules/@openzeppelin/hardhat-upgrades/src/utils/validations.ts:42:13)
    at Object.deployImpl (/Users/paulrberg/workspace/hifi/deployers/node_modules/@openzeppelin/hardhat-upgrades/src/utils/deploy-impl.ts:27:23)
    at Proxy.deployProxy (/Users/paulrberg/workspace/hifi/deployers/node_modules/@openzeppelin/hardhat-upgrades/src/deploy-proxy.ts:57:18)

Environment

See my deployer script. The Hardhat artifact is imported from an external package @hifi/protocol.

[frangio]

In theory it would work, but would be too difficult given the current architecture of the project. I’ll take note as something that we’ll probably need to solve in the future.

[paulrberg]

An idea: what if we point the OZ Hardhat plugin to the source code of the contract in an npm package, and also provide a Solidity settings object as defined by Hardhat? Would this, in theory, be a good enough workaround for the lack of the cache folder?