Composer Path Repositories without a package manager - php

Question

Since composer merge plugin is deprecated and the alternative is use of composer path repositories I found a problem transitioning to the later.
My structure is:
/composer.json
/local/composer.json
Where /composer.json is main composer with all setup and /local/composer.json is a file managing only private repositories.
Contents of each file are:
#/composer.json
{
"name": "main/project",
"type": "project",
"repositories": [
{
"type": "path",
"url": "local"
}
],
"require": {
"sub/project": "dev-main"
},
"extra": {
"installer-paths": {
"web/modules/custom/{$name}": [
"type:drupal-custom-module"
]
}
}
}
#/local/composer.json
{
"name": "sub/project",
"autoload": {},
"repositories": {
"test_repo": {
"type": "git",
"url": "git#github.com:rotari/test_repo.git"
}
},
"require": {
"rotari/test_repo": "dev-main"
}
}
As you can see the plan is simple: main composer requires sub/project and sub/project requires rotari/test_repo. However on install I'm prompted with error
sub/project dev-main requires rotari/test_repo dev-main -> could not be found in any version
Running composer install in /local is a success so there is no problem accessing rotari/test_repo.
Any idea or suggestions how this issue could be solved?

Answer 1

This part from documentation answers my quetion:
https://getcomposer.org/doc/faqs/why-cant-composer-load-repositories-recursively.md
Composer in not able to load repositories recursively.