composer/composer — pull request #343 by mikey179 (2012-02-21 01:06:49+00:00)
Title: Possibility to prefer dist over source for packages in dev version

When working on a package A with dependency to another package B in a version currently in development (e.g. something like dev-master), all users working on package A must also have the possibility to do a checkout of package B.

Unfortunately this is not always possible. For example, when working in a SVN environment and on Windows it is not always the case that Git is installed. Since the change to force installation of dev packages from source it is not possible any more to work on package A in such an environment as long as there is no real release of package B with the required version available.

This pull request is intended to start a discussion on whether there should be a command line switch that allows to install dev packages from dist. I think it should be worked out properly how this behaves together with the already existing `--prefer-source` switch.

The attached changes introduce a `--prefer-dist` command line option which is considered in the `DownloadManager`. However, I'm very unsure about the implications and as you can see the if statement is now slightly more complex. Additionally I didn't test on whether the signature change of the `InstallCommand::install()` method didn't break other things. So as I said, it's intended to start a discussion, not to get merged right now.