Node.js distributions include npm with deeply nested node_modules

[rajsite]

• Version:
  Any
• Platform:
  Windows
• Subsystem:
  npm

The zip distributions available on nodejs.org/dist include a copy of npm with deeply nested node_modules, for example: https://nodejs.org/dist/v8.9.1/node-v8.9.1-win-x64.zip

It would be helpful on Windows (with its terrible long path support) to run npm dedupe on the bundled npm prior to archiving. This will allow Windows archive tooling to extract the contents without error as well as other tools in the Windows pipeline.

Context:
Was including node.exe and npm in a .NET nuget package and the nuget tooling has sub par long path support and I think other projects have an issue with this as well.

When trying to bundle / unbundle the deeply nested resources into a nuget package everything seems to work okay. However if I tried to use the resulting bundled npm I would get errors occurring at module.js:538 saying that the semver library could not be found. This was because those modules somehow got lost in packaging / unpackaging process for the nupkg file.

Unzipping the distribution and using the global copy of npm on my dev machine to dedupe the bundled version before packaging seems to do the trick but is painful to automate since so many command line tools on Windows fail on the long paths.

[bnoordhuis]

You should report this over at https://github.com/npm/npm/issues. We redistribute npm essentially unchanged from upstream and I don't think we want to be in the business of repackaging it.

[MylesBorins]

closing in lieu of report at npm
AFAIK they do run dedupe as part of vendoring

[TheCloudlessSky]

@MylesBorins running dedupe doesn't really help fix the long path problem.