npm upgrade

[rvagg]

Docker are pinning to specific, recent versions of npm in their official Node.js images, see here for example. As of the next release they'll be putting [email protected] with each of their 0.8, 0.10 and 0.11 builds.

Currently we are just using the same version of npm that is bundled with the Node release that we're picking up from our deb & rpm distributions. We have the opportunity to do a similar thing to what Docker are doing and explicitly upgrade the version of npm we are distributing in our own nodesource/node Docker images.

Should we do this? If so, how do we determine what version of npm to pin to? How much more extensive do we need to make a test suite to test that this works (probably if we pull in these ideas: nodesource/distributions#12 (comment) to the distro test script we could just pull that down and run inside the containers to test them).

@othiym23 your opinion here would be very helpful!

[othiym23]

I think both @isaacs and I would love to see npm@latest shipping in the Docker images for whichever Node versions you support (assuming those versions are not <= 0.8.0). Until I get npmconf defactored back into the main CLI project, it's a two-step upgrade process on Node 0.8 (assuming you start with the official Node installer), but it's not that bad: npm -g install [email protected] && npm -g install npm.

I also have a PR open joyent/node (nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8433) that shows how to run a more robust set of tests for npm. I run this test suite constantly on latest stable, and intermittently on 0.11.14 and 0.8.x. I know that at least a portion of the core team use installing hapi as a stress test of npm. I still haven't had the time to dedicate to putting together a good CI strategy for npm and its attendant modules.

[retrohacker]

Migrating to new repo 🍻