Question: nvm availability through standard package managers

[davvolun]

This is a general question related to why nvm isn't available / intended to be available through standard packages like apt or even npm.

1. Why? Obviously. Specifically, it would be nice to see this detailed on the wiki. The only reference I see is that nvm is "designed to be installed per-user, and invoked per-shell." Why is it important that nvm be installed per-user, as opposed to being capable of being installed either per user or system wide? If I'm running a large scale, multi user environment (say, a university), and I know I want nvm available, I have to install (and update?) separately for every user? I see the value of installing and maintaining different versions of node via nvm, but why do I want multiple versions of nvm?
2. There are (valid) concerns about installing things via curl/wget. Is there a discussion around this? It would be nice if that were detailed too.

[ljharb]

Installing through npm wouldn't make much sense, since if you need nvm, you don't have node or npm in the first place.

Distributing on apt would be more work for me, and since the only software one should install from a source is software its maintainers put there, most of your stuff shouldn't be coming from apt anyways.

As for why it's per-user - if it's systemwide, then you can't npm install -g or install/'remove node versions without sudo, and, any global changes one user makes pollute the environment for another user - it's simply a subpar system architecture to share these things across users. You could certainly share the same copy of nvm.sh across users, and set a different NVM_DIR per user, but the usage of each instance of nvm should be per-user.

There are (valid) concerns about installing things via curl/wget

No, there aren't. That's just security theater.