Duplicate and incompatible dependencies when using `patch` on crate with inherited workspace dependencies

1

I'm currently playing around with wasmtime (GitHub, crates.io.)
While doing so, I wanted to modify the wasmtime-wasi-nn crate (GitHub, crates.io.), which depends on wasmtime and lives in the same repository and cargo workspace.
So I did the following:

  1. clone the wasmtime repository (at the commit of the last crates crates.io release)
  2. do some modifications to my local version of wasmtime-wasi-nn
  3. patch the wasmtime-wasi-nn in my project like this:
[patch.crates-io]
wasmtime-wasi-nn = { path = "../wasmtime/crates/wasi-nn" }

Now I have the problem that there are two incompatible versions of wasmtime in my dependency tree:

  • the crates.io version (direct dependency of my project)
  • my local version, on which the my modified wasmtime-wasi-nn depends (through [dependencies] wasmtime = { workspace = true ... })

I thought that there should be a way to make my local wasmtime-wasi-nn depend on the crates.io version (without changing it's Cargo.toml, as i would have to undo these changes if i wanted to contribute my changes back to the repo).
Or perhaps there is another approach that I am overlooking...

I look forward to any suggestions.

2

No, there isn't. The way that that change normally happens is that the Cargo.toml is edited by cargo publish to remove the path parts and leave only version (and replace workspace = true with the data it's referring to).

You can make that change in a separate commit on a separate branch, so it doesn't interfere with contributing the other change back.

Or, you can add to [patch.crates.io] a patch for the wasmtime package too, so they both use your local copy. That'll probably have better compatibility anyway.

3

Thanks for clarifying on why / how this works the way it does!

4

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