v2.8.2
PEACE IN OUR TIME
npm has been having an issue with CouchDB's web server since the release of io.js and Node.js 0.12.0 that has consumed a huge amount of my time to little visible effect. Sam Mikes picked up the thread from me, and after a lot of effort figured out that ultimately there are probably a couple problems with the new HTTP Agent keep-alive handling in new versions of Node. In addition, npm-registry-client was gratuitously sending a body along with a GET request which was triggering the bugs. Sam removed about 10 bytes from one file in npm-registry-client, and this problem, which has been bugging us for months, completely went away.
In conclusion, Sam Mikes is great, and anybody using a private registry hosted on CouchDB should thank him for his hard work. Also, thanks to the community at large for pitching in on this bug, which has been around for months now.