So basically, what you're saying is that its hard to package Node apps using the typical systems package managers in situations where you want to build everythi

So basically, what you're saying is that its hard to package Node apps using the typical systems package managers in situations where you want to build everything from source. I can live with that. The worst fate would be having to modify what npm does (replacing the package fetch with building from source). Given that npm is licensed under the artistic license, thats not half as bad as it sounds. I do agree that there is a lot of unnecessary complexity introduced by today's JS build tools such as grunt and gulp. But npm isn't to blame about that - its only sin is creating and nesting duplicate dependencies, something which is already fixed by npm 3 (completely flat node_modules unless there are unavoidable dependency conflicts). The solution here is to avoid bloated packages such as grunt and gulp that try to install everything plus the world. (coffee-script grunt? seriously?) One thing npm could do is separate buildDependencies from devDependencies. There are a lot of tools listed there that only pertain to testing, and testing a serious client-side JS library such as jQuery properly is a hard and complex endeavour. Also, I can't help but notice the irony of complaining about the complexity of web application build tools given the complexity hell that are autotools :)