It generally dumps a ton of colorful errors to your terminal. If you find them obscure, please be comforted by the fact that I certainly do not find them obscure, and would love to fix whatever problem they indicate. It's actually my job.
Also, npm is a software program, and not intelligent. It doesn't "like" things. To the extent that it has preferences, it loves semantic versions, accurate metadata, and especially you.
Here's the obscure blowups that were filed in November alone;
https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1793 https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1790 https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1809 https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1785 https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1801 https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1770 https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1727 https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1654
So, when you say "obscure blowup", do you mean, "someone posted any issue whatsoever"?
Several of those are feature requests, or node-core bugs, or things that have been fixed.
I find your blowup very obscure. As for npm failing for you, gist or it didn't happen.
No, I mean "random malfunction without clear indication of what happened and how to fix it".
Several of those are feature requests, or node-core bugs
Might be a mindset thing. How many of the 8 bugs qualify as feature requests/node bugs for you?
gist or it didn't happen.
The gist is that npm needs to become more defensive, clearly state its own dependencies, and not barf random stack traces in the face of problems. You should also have a unix-guy fix the installer. Demanding 'sudo' is not only an embarrassing but also a potentially dangerous mistake.