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Comment by bjg | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why they didn't reinstall my packages after forcibly removing them. Take five minutes and write the currently installed package list to a tmp file, and then install all those packages again automatically after the upgrade.

I just ended up copying the list to a file, then:

          cat list | xargs npm install

Other than that, awesome! npm has always been rather pleasant to use.

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Yes, there should be a warning that this REMOVES ALL YOUR EXISTING PACKAGES. Make a list of what is already installed before installing this version of npm.

There was such a warning originally, but it didn't wait to ask you if you wanted to continue. Now it does.

The problem with just automatically re-installing those is that npm 0.x only had a global install space, and that was typically used for modules that were loaded via require().

In npm 1.0, you put require()-able modules in the ./node_modules in your project (local install), and you usually want to install CLI apps globally, so that their bins end up in /usr/local/bin. The 'npm link' command puts packages in the global space, and then symlinks them locally.

See `npm help folders` for more info on the differences.

There's no way for the install script to know what you were doing with each of those. Just cat'ing the list to `xargs npm install` isn't very helpful, because that's going to just install them in ./node_modules.

What you really want to do is use your human brain to split that list into two lists, and decide where each item should go.

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