What's the story for NPM packages?

[Benny Siegert <bsiegert%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Hi!

I am dabbling with some web stuff and so I tried the node.js pkgsrc
package. While it works perfectly fine (thanks for that!), what about
npm?

When you try to install, say, bower "globally", it is trying to write
directly under /usr/pkg, which is probably not a good idea. Then
again, installing bower pulls in literally hundreds of npm
dependencies, so I don't think that adding pkgsrc packages for each
individual one is a good use of anyone's time.

So what should we do? Maybe add logic to npm to create "ephemeral"
packages and at least register the metadata? Or do hundreds of trivial
packages, cpan-style?

--Benny.