v3.5.4

v3.5.4 (2015-12-10):

I hope you all had fantastic winter holidays, if it's winter where you are and if there are holidays‼ We went a few weeks without releases because staff was taking time away from work here and there. A new year has come and we're back now, and refreshed and ready to dig in!

This week brings us a bunch of documentation improvements and some module updates. The core team's focus continues to be on improving tests, particularly with Windows, so there's not too much to call out here.

DOCUMENTATION IMPROVEMENTS

• 6b0031e #11044 Correct documentation regarding the defaults for the color config option. (@scottaddie)
• c6ce69e #10990 Drop mentions in documentation of process.installPrefix, as it hasn't been a thing since Node.js 0.6 and we don't support that. (@jeffmcmahan)
• dee92d1 #11037 Clarify the documentation on the max length of the name property in package.json files. (@scottaddie)
• 4b9d7bb #10787 Make the formatting in the documentation for npm dist-tag more consistent with other docs. (@cvrebert)
• 7f77a80 #10787 Add documentation to the npm dist-tag docs that explains in greater detail how latest is different than other tags. Further, improve the documentation with better examples. Add a discussion of common practice for using dist tags to manage alpha's and beta's. (@cvrebert)
• 6db58dd 2ee6371 #10788 #10789 Improve documentation cross referencing. (@cvrebert)
• 7ba629a #10790 Document more clearly that npm install foo means npm install foo@latest. (@cvrebert)

A FEW MODULE UPDATES

• fc2e8d5 [email protected]: Remove deprecated features and fix a bunch of bugs. (@isaacs)
• 5b820c4 [email protected]: Change the default on windows to be false, as international windows installs often install to non-unicode codepages and there's no way to detect this short of a system call or a call to a command line program. (@iarna)
• 238fe84 [email protected]: Fixed bugs with uid/gid checks and with quoted windows PATH parts. (@isaacs)
• 5e510e1 [email protected]: Add ability to disable glob support / pass in options. (@isaacs)
• 7558215 [email protected]: Minor performance improvements. (@calvinmetcalf)
• 64e8499 [email protected]: Rewrite to use modern streams even on 0.8 plus a bunch of tests. (@iarna)
• 74d92a0 [email protected]: Some bug fixes around large inputs. (@timoxley)

FIX NPM'S TESTS ON 0.8

This doesn't impact you as a user of npm, and ordinarily that means we wouldn't call it out here, but if you've ever wanted to contribute, having that green travis badge makes it a lot easier to do so with confidence!

• b14cdbb #10872 Rewrite tests using nock to use other alternatives. (@zkat)

• 59ed01a #10872 Node.js 0.8 http streams have a bug, where if they're paused with data in their buffers when the socket closes, they call end before emptying those buffers, which results in the entire pipeline ending and thus the point that applied backpressure never being able to trigger a resume.

  We work around this by piping into a pass through stream that has unlimited buffering. The pass through stream is from readable-stream and is thus a current streams3 implementation that is free of these bugs even on 0.8. (@iarna)