On: Npm v5.0.0 released

[cheapsteak]

>resolved by dropping npm-cli from the official releases.

But that would break 7 years of documentation and tutorials, likely bad for newcomers and thus the ecosystem

[k__ → cheapsteak]

so npm has created a huge vendor lock-in and we should live with it?!

[SilasX → k__]

"The only reason God could create the world in six days is, He didn't have to worry about backward compatibility."

[fibo → SilasX]

LOL

[cheapsteak → k__]

As with any vendor lock-in situation, decisions should be made based on cost/benefit

Perhaps you can help come up with a strategy that gracefully handles breakages and eventually results in dropping npm-cli

[josteink → cheapsteak]

Not to mention quite a few CI build pipelines.

[pluma → josteink]

FWIW it's trivial to install yarn already: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install

NPM currently doesn't provide a standalone distribution as far as I can tell, but presumably they would offer one if they no longer had the luxury of being bundled with Node.

Since changes generally don't happen overnight I would expect a transitional period where Node still bundles npm-cli but npm Inc has the time to prepare a standalone distribution before yarn replaces npm-cli. Additionally downstream channels could decide to provide legacy packages containing both.