title: Updating transitive dependencies of a NPM package
body: <p>Our company has a few web applications which in turn depend on a very long chain of internally created and hosted npm packages (we use JFrog Artifactory) each with their own dependencies (and so on). Whenever a bug is fixed or a feature is implemented in a low-level package the current process requires a developer to check in their changes, wait for the CICD build to complete and tests to run, update the parent package, and rinse / repeat all the way up the chain (which can be a very long process).</p>
  
  <p>This can't possibly be a unique situation yet it impacts our productivity greatly and encourages monolithic package development to limit number of packages to update instead of proper code separation.</p>
  
  <p>I can only think of two solutions:</p>
  
  <p>1) Update the web application to use the transitive dependency directly in package.json. This however breaks "encapsulation" because how a direct dependency manages its job shouldn't be known to the web application. If the direct dependency were to use some other transitive dependency later the web application shouldn't be left referencing a now irrelevant package.</p>
  
  <p>2) Modify the web application's package-lock.json to point at the new version of the transitive dependency. This however seems to only work temporarily as merge conflicts or new installs of direct dependencies tend to revert these changes.</p>
  
  <p>I realize that the answer might be to optimize the build / publish process to be less painful and manual but I was hoping others might have encountered a different solution.</p>
  
  <p>FYI - All dependencies are installed with '~' as a version prefix by default.</p>