goggles.mozilla.org VS safernode

> check out the Web X-Ray repo <https://github.com/mozilla/goggles.mozilla.org/>.

Thanks for example. Peeking a bit under the hood, it appears to be due to transitive dependencies referencing github urls (and transient ones at that) instead of semver, which admittedly is neither standard nor good practice...

FWIW, simply removing `"grunt-contrib-jshint": "~0.4.3",` from package.json and related jshint-related code from Gruntfile was sufficient to get `npm install` to complete successfully. The debugging just took me a few minutes grepping package-lock.json for the 404 URL in question (https://github.com/ariya/esprima/tarball/master) and tracing that back to a top-level dependency via recursively grepping for dependent packages. I imagine that upgrading relevant dependencies might also do the trick, seeing as jshint no longer depends on esprima[0].

I'm not sure how representative this particular case is to the sort of issues you run into, but I'll tell that reproducibility issues can get a lot worse in ways that committing deps doesn't help (for example, issues like this one[1] are nasty to narrow down).

But assuming that installation in your link just happens to have a simple fix and that others are not as forgiving, how is committing node_modules supposed to help here if you're saying you can't even get it to a working state in the first place? DO you own the repo in order to be able to make the change? Or are you mostly just saying that hindsight is 20-20?

[0] https://github.com/jshint/jshint/blob/master/package.json#L4...

[1] https://github.com/node-ffi-napi/node-ffi-napi/issues/143

Seems like a good time to plug my project https://gitlab.com/mikecardwell/safernode