repositories, and serves
various purposes:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Describe a single representation of a dependency tree such that
teammates, deployments, and continuous integration are guaranteed to
install exactly the same dependencies.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Provide a facility for users to "time-travel" to previous states of
<code>node_modules</code> without having to commit the directory itself.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Facilitate greater visibility of tree changes through readable source
control diffs.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>