When the analyzer sees a "package:" import, it needs to find the local physical path to that file. Currently, it relies on "packages" directories to resolve these, but that means pub has to set up those directories and symlinks.

It would be nice if pub could just tell the analyzer where the packages are. After some discussion our current plan is to add a command to pub. This command will output a JSON map describing the local path to the root directory for each package that an application depends on. Like:

{
  "foo": "/local/path/to/foo",
  "bar": "../bar"
  ...
}

This will use whatever information is currently in the lockfile for the entrypoint package to determine what to print. If there is no lockfile, it will probably just fail with an error.