With that approach, the module loader needs to know which version of a module to load for you when you require() something - in the general case that can't be d

With that approach, the module loader needs to know which version of a module to load for you when you require() something - in the general case that can't be done without parsing your package.json . This would require changes to node itself, not just npm, as well as all the external tools that implemented node's current require algorithm.