Shrinkwrap is a partially successful attempt to solve the problem, but still has obvious flaws. For example, instead of the relatively neat version specificatio

Shrinkwrap is a partially successful attempt to solve the problem, but still has obvious flaws. For example, instead of the relatively neat version specifications normally used in package.json, with a shrinkwrapped project you wind up with https://registry.npmjs.org/.. https://registry.npmjs.org/... paths instead, but only sometimes. This gets messy if you want to both install stable versions of all your packages and use a local registry to supply them for reliability, which is not an unlikely combination.