I don't think effective package management solutions were really pioneered by node and NPM.

You could pretty easily re-write your comment and say "Look at the trails Debian + apt have blazed. That's the right move."

Or, for a more apt (heh) comparison:

https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems

"If you are writing a package manager for a new non-js language, do whatever it takes to get that new language to load modules the way node does. The right way."

http://dominictarr.com/post/25516279897/why-you-should-never...

http://dontkry.com/posts/code/modules-the-right-way.html

To be more specific, what npm does that pip, debian, and rubygems don't do is nested dependencies, which is a wonderful advancement.

rubygems has been bundled with ruby since 2009, and perl has had cpan since about forever.

npm badly re-implements what others have done dozens of times. The whole node ecology suffers heavily from "not invented here" syndrome.

Isn't virtualenv going to be bundled too?

a flavor of virtualenv was bundled in 3.3 (http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.3.0/) but without pip or easy_install it was a pretty useless feature IMO.

Python has had a good installer forever. The only difference is that it wasn't centrally mandated. If you need something to be centrally mandated in order to use it, I feel for you.

It does help to know that it exists.