About a year and a half ago, I wrote a "periodic update" of the npm CLI road map. Apparently the period is 19 months! Of the 7 high-level items on the list, we've since addressed 3, which I'm going to call "not bad", given that at least one of the things we shipped, which turned out to be npm@3
, is probably the most substantial rewrite of npm's core installer since the very early days of the CLI.
npm's developers need to trust its tests. They're the single most important signal that a new version of npm is not going to break users' workflows when a new release is pushed out. Unfortunately, we don't, and once we realized that, it became clear that we could no longer put off working on the test suite until we do trust the tests.
Here's the requirements we identified:
- The tests need to be always passing, not just locally, but in Travis, so we have a way of gauging if your patches are safe to merge.
- np