it looks like the tests use ports from URLs like git+ssh://git@notgithub.com:user/foo that aren't valid (a url's port must be numeric else it's not a valid url)

url.parse silently fails and sets port to null, URL.parse returns null instead of an URL

Apparently url.parse was removed upstream long ago: npm#141

I've redone this PR porting the necessary changes from there and from npm#200 in order for it to work and for the tests to pass 👍

although the proper fix would be to just pull from upstream

We can try to switch to the original package. Looking at the commits in this repo, the fork was created to add support for aliases. npm also added support for aliases since then.

sadly, latest version from upstream requires node 18.17.0 and up. no idea if they actually use node >=18.17 features but the engines field is set that way