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Comment by petetnt | Hacker News Reader

There has been no problems with folder nesting in `npm` in general since the version@3 came out over a year ago.

This isn't true though.

npm chooses the first version of a package it encounters to install at the top level. Every other version is installed nested. If you have N uses of version A and one use of version B, but version B is installed first, then you get N copies of the package at version A.

It's improved but it's not fixed. if a depends on c 1.0 and b depend on c 2.0, both versions of c need to be installed and one of them will be nested.

...which is actually good. With Java and maven, you cannot use multiple versions of a library.

What's the solution for that case though (one which requires no nesting)? I don't think a solution with no nesting exists given the current module resolution algorithm of Node.js, which allows for only a single version of a particular package to exist at a given level.

nesting can't be prevented in that case (at least with the current node require() design). It gets really bad if you have 10 packages that depend on c@1.0.0 and 10 packages that depend on c@2.0.0 -- one of them will install in the root directory and the other 10 will be duplicated. ied stores a single copy of each package@version and uses symlinks which is an improvement. Apparently yarn tried something similar but it breaks some packages (that check where they're located for example).

https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied

I could be prevented. Another project does this by using a hash of the project to all all dependencies at one level then symlinks the dependencies from hash to name so it references the correct version.

> no problems

Absolute and utter hogwash.

I don't even need to get into versioning to make this argument but I'll exclude it for clarity's sake. Simple scenario:

    root -> A
    root -> B
    root -> C
    A -> B
    B -> C

What folder structure is created?

    root/node_modules/A/node_modules/B/node_modules/C
    root/node_modules/B/node_modules/C
    root/node_modules/C

Symlink that all you want, how is it in any way whatsoever thoughtful and elegant? It's not a real solution by any stretch of the imagination. Myriads of pre-existing systems that correctly deal with this scenario existed at the time that NPM was concoted. Ignored. Considering that node is touted as a cross-platform solution, how well does version@3 deal with filesystems that don't support symlinks? I've run into this: not at all.

NPM version@3 could not be further from the ethos of "engineering." It's an outright hack, and it quickly betrays its limitations. It could have been far simpler, far more considerate of pre-existing wisdom.

what you described is npm@2's behaviour. npm@3 will flatten dependencies as much as possible

How does it flatten dependencies? Symlinks?

no, it just installs everything it can into the top level node_modules. npm@2 would do this to a degree as well, it was just less sophisticated about it.

> into the top level node_modules.

Just tried using npm3 explicitly and I stand corrected.

(other than its non-determinism)

And Yarn it deterministic! :party_parrot:

fwiw npm really needs an `exec` command like bundler has (ie `npm exec bin-cmd`).

"$(npm bin)/bin-cmd" is getting really old

You can use `npm run env bin-cmd` for that. It's not as convenient as `npm exec bin-cmd` would be, but it might be easier to type than `$(npm bin)/bin-cmd`.

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