[geoffschmidt]

Meteor is a lot more than an npm package. For example, if you type these four commands..

$ curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh; meteor create myapp; cd myapp; meteor

you're up and running with a complete stack including MongoDB, node, the dozen-ish core packages that make up the Meteor pubsub and realtime templating stack, and the 'meteor' build tool (which can do things like compile coffeescript and less, generate source maps, minify your production code, and provide a realtime development environment where whenever you save a file your app updates in your browser.)

As for versioning, it's actually got a great way of doing that. Each of your Meteor projects is locked to a specific Meteor release version (similar to an Ubuntu release, it's a release-engineered snapshot of the Meteor core packages), which you can set with the `meteor update` command. And this has automatic `npm shrinkwrap` integration so that if you use npm packages alongside Meteor packages, everyone on your team is always running exactly the same versions of all of the code in your app. The Meteor tools automatically handle all the work of downloading any needed Meteor versions and keeping them installed side-by-side on your laptop, using the correct one for a given project, and notifying you of available updates.

[sonnym]

I want to like meteor.

It sounds like the installation script, aside from handling the MongoDB and node setup, could be treated like a typical node package. Based on the fact that meteor has no package.json, seemingly none of those core packages are installed via npm either.

I may be alone in this, but I guess I would just prefer if my web framework expected me to have the interpreter and database installed, and used the package manager already provided for this environment.

[parasj]

Meteor does feel a little heavy (especially when you get around to deploying it) but take a look at demeteorizer, at https://github.com/onmodulus/demeteorizer

It converts Meteor apps into more traditional node.js with a package.json

[emgee3]

Demeteorizer is a offensively named script that automatically builds a package.json for you. It doesn't make Meteor apps lighter weight or anything like that. It simply makes it easier for you to install the requisite npm dependencies.

[emgee3]

While it would be trivially easy to port the Meteor installer to npm, since Meteor doesn't require node or npm to be installed, it would be a step backward to do so.

Meteor is built against specific node and npm versions and the install script installs the necessary node binaries.

Considering what Meteor brings a developer, getting hung up on the install method is missing the big picture.