The lack of activity in the issue is sadly not rare for npm.
I use npm in a continuous integration/deployment system for a project. The system used to do a git checkout, `npm install` to get the dependencies, and then a build, but then we ran into a few extremely confusing issues where we actually had a couple old dependencies tested and deployed into production because npm install failed to respect the shrinkwrap fully (yet it still exited successfully). We finally had to write a script which compares the node_modules directory against the shrinkwrap, and if there's a mismatch, it removes the entire directory and re-runs `npm install`. Thankfully `npm install` tends to install everything fine from a fresh slate, but it's just soo slow (which is also surprising to me, because shouldn't most everything be cached into ~/.npm if I've installed nearly all of the same dependencies recently? I would think that installing from a shrinkwrap of many things I've installed before would mostly be un-tarring things from cache)...