configure does not handle permissions gracefully.

[lewellyn]

Currently, onfigure uses a mix of npm invocations, some by invoking sudo and some by running in the user's context. This causes permissions issues if the user has never invoked npm before:

npm ERR! Error: EACCES, open '/home/lewellyn/.npm/e81c1faa-jasmine-node-1-0-7.lock'
npm ERR!  { [Error: EACCES, open '/home/lewellyn/.npm/e81c1faa-jasmine-node-1-0-7.lock']
npm ERR!   errno: 3,
npm ERR!   code: 'EACCES',
npm ERR!   path: '/home/lewellyn/.npm/e81c1faa-jasmine-node-1-0-7.lock' }
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Please try running this command again as root/Administrator.

The status of $HOME/.npm is, not surprisingly, as follows:

drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Feb  5 21:10 /home/lewellyn/.npm/

Tested on a stock install of Ubuntu 12.10 with the following post-install configuration:

• Allowed Software Updates to install any updates.
• Installed nodejs and npm from ppa:chris-lea/node.js along with python-software-properties python g++ make openssh-server vim-athena.
• Installed NDK and updated to latest SDK version.
• Cloned the next branch of BB10-Webworks-Packager and copied over the dependencies.
• Sourced the NDK environment and ran configure.

[lewellyn]

I see two possible solutions here.

1. Try to run npm as the user or as root, consistently.
2. Ensure that $HOME/.npm exists prior to invoking npm, and is owned by the user.

I'm not in a position to make any judgements about the first option, so lacking any better ideas, I personally prefer the latter.