After recently reading up various posts on the benefits of using local modules instead of global ones (for instance, this post from mikeal rogers on local module support in node 0.4.0), I'm wondering if it's possible to have meteor not installed as a machine-wide app first, but instead just as part of a 'regular' node app. Likely this would mean that the entry point (app.js or whatever) would call out to meteor.js and friends installed in the project dir (under node_modules, presumably).
There could still be a machine-wide install (if needed/desired), but instead of including the actual app code, it would just allow creating a new meteor project from a template.
Admittedly, this seems opposite of the current meteor design where the project dir only has server/client/public in the typical case, so maybe there's just a more fundamental philosophical difference and meteor intentionally wants to be a global/machine-scoped entity?
I realize that starting/configuring mongodb is part of meteor's running, but it doesn't seem like that precludes use of 'local meteor' AFAICT?
I think you can sort of achieve what you want using Meteorite. We are about to release a version in the next few days that properly locks down the version of meteor & and meteor smart packages that you use.
You don't get the "benefits" of having other peoples code checked into your repo, however personally I am less than convinced[1] about that.
PS. I don't really see why they say you can't lock down all the dependencies of dependencies anyway. Bundler does exactly that for rails (and we do it now in meteorite). But this isn't the right place to discuss this.
[1] to say the least.