[feature request] add workspace dependency syntax support for pubspec.yaml

[luo2430]

Info

- Dart 3.11.0 (stable) (Mon Feb 9 00:38:07 2026 -0800) on "windows_x64"
- on windows / "Windows 11 家庭版" 10.0 (Build 26200)
- locale is zh-CN

Currently, when using pub workspace, the local package in pubspec.yaml references the local package in the workspace is written exactly the same as the dependency reference to the external pub.dev. This syntactic ambiguity can lead to the inability to visually distinguish between local dependencies and external dependencies.

pubspec.yaml for pub

# local
flutter_package_1:
flutter_package_1: any
flutter_package_1: ^0.0.1

# external
flutter_lints:
flutter_lints: any
flutter_lints: ^6.0.0

package.json for pnpm

// local
"common-utils": "workspace:*"
"common-utils": "workspace:^0.0.1" // This version can be written, but it will actually be ignored

// external
"@types/node": "*"
"@types/node": "^25.3.3"

Expected

Referring to pnpm workspace dependency syntax, I expect to introduce a similar explicit workspace dependency declaration for pubspec.yaml.

flutter_package_1: workspace
flutter_package_1: workspace:any
flutter_package_1: workspace:^0.0.1

# or
flutter_package_1:
  workspace:
flutter_package_1:
  workspace: any
flutter_package_1:
  workspace: ^0.0.1

https://github.com/luo2430/dart_pub_issue_4790

The project directory is shown in the image below

[FMorschel]

CC @sigurdm

[sigurdm]

The reason it is like this, is that packages can be consumed from outside the workspace also, and in that case they need their dependencies from pub.dev or some other source.
If you want to know if a package is local or not you should look in pubspec.lock. If the package does not occur there, it is a workspace package. (Or you can look in .dart_tool/package_graph.json at the roots: entry).

[luo2430]

@sigurdm
I respect your considerations, and there may be breaking changes to this plan. I re-thought a solution that was backward compatible and took advantage of the fact that yaml can be annotated compared to json.

flutter_package_1: # workspace
flutter_package_1: any # workspace
flutter_package_1: ^0.0.1 # workspace

In some cases where pubspec.yaml will be modified, such as flutter pub add, add the # workspace suffix to the workspace dependency, and delete the # workspace suffix for non-workspace dependencies.

https://github.com/luo2430/dart_pub_issue_4790