With npm version 5 we gained a lot of welcome new features and performance improvements. I've been happily using npm@5 for several months, but recently discovered a major problem that dramatically affects my workflow. When I'm updating a package, I want to test that package locally WITHOUT pushing changes to the Git repository. To do so, I found it best to install that package into another project to test/run the code. This worked great with npm versions prior to npm@5, but now I have two major problems. First, npm modifies the package.json to insert a "file:" dependency, overwriting the existing dependency, and second it makes a symlink to the package rather than doing a proper installation.