[eridius]

Except not all dependency managers support it. I'm not even sure if it's safe to say that a majority of dependency managers support it.

[gnoway]

Package persistence is not really a dependency manager feature though, it's a package repository feature. npm didn't fail; npmjs.com did.

I'm just waiting for this to happen to bower next. AFAIK they're just a registry pointing to github. All it's going to take is someone doing a force push without thinking and we're in this same situation again.