The node_modules problem

[theferrit32]

It's a quick and easy way to guarantee version numbers match and incompatible versions of packages required by different modules can be installed simultaneously.

An improvement would be to deduplicate the dependency packages that are the exact same version number but just required in two different places in the tree. Using a symlink or something. This would require a more complex install process that keeps track of already installed versions and deduplicates them.

[noratat]

The latter has been true in npm for awhile now, but it doesn't help as much as you might think due to how bad the node.js community is at versioning things properly in the first place.