Support for "paket link"

Hi guys,
I'm not sure if you already know that but some package managers like bower offer a way to link multiple local dependencies so it is very easy for a programmer to code a feature spread on more than one component.

For example,
In every component I need to locally share I must first register each with:

bower link

Then, where I want to use, for each needed component I do:

bower link COMPONENT-NAME

This creates a symlink on the file system based on the registered path for that component.

All of this mean that I can work with my components and everything is naturally "synchronized".

In .Net world with Paket, I suppose that the solution might be to introduce the very same local registration process and then symlink installed nuget component with the installed folder. For example

./packages/[group]/MyComponent/*

Obviously, this would not work "out-of-the-box" because nuget packages get deployed according to their definitions (for example lib, content, tools, .net version folders, etc.)

I suppose we can try to mimic nuget package deployment behavior or we can adjust the algorithm that modifies msbuild targets into project files, I don't know.

Right now I need to manually change my "Output path" for each built component I want to easily code with. Otherwise, I need to do the whole round-trip of packaging a new nuget component, publishing it and pulling it.

Any thoughts?

Thank you!

Start by tracing Paket's package installation flow and the algorithm that modifies MSBuild targets, then compare the requested local-link behavior with NuGet's lib, content, tools, and framework-specific layout. Done would require a defined registration and linking workflow that supports local components without manually changing output paths.