Yeah, that's the greedy algorithm and it will probably take you pretty far, but there's no guarantee that it's optimal. What if the package has lots of dependen

Yeah, that's the greedy algorithm and it will probably take you pretty far, but there's no guarantee that it's optimal. What if the package has lots of dependencies, but they are already covered by other packages. Do you kick other packages out? Which ones? Or is it better to keep them in and add some other packages? This problem is almost certainly NP-complete (it's basically the the "set cover" problem from Karp's 21 NP-complete problems), so for something the size of NPM it's almost certainly infeasible. Your greedy version would probably get you a pretty nice result, though.