Checklist

• make -j4 test (UNIX), or vcbuild test (Windows) passes
• tests and/or benchmarks are included
• documentation is changed or added
• commit message follows commit guidelines

Affected core subsystem(s)

• deps

Description of Changes

Ahahaha it's May 9th! Check it out!

This is the first PR for the long-awaited npm@5. This is beta software, but we intend to have it production-ready by May 30th. This release has all the really big changes going in.

The biggest thing to note about this release is that it involves a rewrite of significant subsystems. Most notably, the entire caching and package-fetching layer have been replaced with new code, right down to the http client being used.

Beyond that, this release includes a number of significant ux-related changes: --save happens by default, a new package-lock.json is generated by default. This file is similar to npm-shrinkwrap.json, and both of the files have been overhauled to play nicer with cross-platform setups and file dependencies.

The release cooked up for this PR is mirroring the current beta releases, but with the binary still named npm, instead of npm5. It also omits the beta notice that happens every time you run the "main" beta client. You can expect this particular release to have a number of issues (tracked in the beta tracking issue for npm@5. There's a number of tests we've excluded from the main test suite because they need to have a few updates before they pass with npm5.

Edit: I know this PR is a bit last minute, but we already talked about how tight a timeline this would be for us. We're working really hard on this release to get it stable and you should see bugfixes and perf improvements happen regularly. We can talk about how often you want us to submit new beta versions to the node repo -- npm i -g npm5 is still the preferred method of testing the beta out, for us.

Changelog

• npm@5 ongoing changelog