[live-preview] library has dependency to payload package

[mumenthalers]

Describe the Bug

According to the package.json of payloadcms/live-preview there are no dependencies.
However the file types.ts has a type import from the payload package.

This results in build failures when payload is not installed (unless skipLib is set of course which should not be the goal).

Imports from the payload package should be omitted.

Link to the code that reproduces this issue

https://stackblitz.com/edit/payload-cms-live-preview-imports-from-payload-package?file=src%2Fmain.ts&view=editor

Reproduction Steps

• run npm install && npm start

Which area(s) are affected?

area: live-preview

Environment Info

- @payloadcms/live-preview@3.67.0
- typescript@5.9.3

[AlessioGr]

Thanks for the report!

This isn't specific to @payloadcms/live-preview - it applies to all Payload packages. None of them are designed to work with skipLibCheck: false. Supporting that would require us to list all packages we import types from as actual dependencies. In the case of the core payload package, that would mean installing packages like graphql and sharp, which are supposed to be optional.

Enabling skipLibCheck: false means our published type declarations get validated under every user's personal tsconfig settings. That introduces a lot of variability, since our packages aren't built to support every possible combination of user compiler options - nor do I want to maintain that level of compatibility surface (I'm very surprised that skipLibCheck is not true by default hah, this seems like very undesirable behavior). Many of our packages don't even support strict: true yet.

On top of that, to guarantee that our dependencies compile cleanly under those conditions, we'd have to adopt skipLibCheck: true in the monorepo ourselves. That would significantly slow down our builds, and in practice it's not feasible - many of our dependencies wouldn't compile, and we have no way to fix those upstream.

The trade-offs don't seem worthwhile. It would slow down builds, increase install sizes, and create ongoing maintenance overhead. I'll convert this to a discussion so we can track interest and revisit the topic if there's strong demand, but for now this is a known limitation of how our type setup works.