This is a pretty impactful change, and not to be taken lightly. Why do you think it's worth the potential negative impact on thousands of users?

@zkat I am well aware that this will have a rather large impact.

In my oppinion there is a fairly large discrepancy in how this script works on a UX level. Most UNIX commands return 1 if something is not defined, just like npm does with everything else. In addition UNIX commands also return 1 when the intended purpose was not fulfilled. Take for example grep which returns 1 if no matches were found.
As a developer or an operations engineer I expect npm test to fail if no one bothered to define it, since it's not doing what you think it is.

Let's think of building a (rather silly) CI pipeline example, where I know that all projects will always be npm based, but then I have to either force the developers to create a test script with exit 1 as default or use some semi-fancy parsing of the pipeline results to identify if any tests have even been run, as I can't count on the output of npm test.

I think it makes a lot of sense to uniform the Interface of how npm test works.

Someone in the npm community already agrees with this as the generated test script includes exit 1

My $0.02 on this:

I think it's a great idea, and long overdue. I don't love the implementation, though. I think you can just delete the default echo command, and let it just be like npm run arglebargle or any other undefined script.

Like,

$ npm test
npm ERR! missing script: test

I seem to recall that I made it do that once upon a time, probably about 7 years ago or so, and some folks objected because they had setups that ran npm test on every install, and a LOT of packages had no test defined, since there were only a few dozen dozen test runners back then.

As a compromise, I made npm init drop that obnoxious "complain and exit in error" test script by default, and it was just enough of a guardrail to get everyone to at least consider writing a test. Now, most packages have tests, and those that don't, have that exit in error "test", so why not just clean it up?

TL;DR

My suggestion:

• Get rid of the special casing around test in lib/run-script.js
• Get rid of the "exit in error" default test in npm init
• As @zkat wisely points out: This is a semver-major change!

@isaacs I really like your suggestion of just deleting the special handling, it makes the most sense here.

This will be included in npm v7. It is a breaking change, or I'd get it done sooner, but it looks good to me. Thanks for your continued patience.

@isaacs I fixed the merge conflicts. Can I do something else to prepare this?

This is looking good. Thanks!

It is a breaking change, but I am sure it can get into npm 7.

@deiga Hey! Sorry for the delay, we've essentially refactored this code in v7 so I'm going to close this for now. Appreciate the thought/contribution.