Can't clone and initialize brave-browser repo with NPM >= 8

[mariospr]

Description

If you have NPM version 8 or greater, chances are that you'll hit an error like this when trying to initialize the repository for the first time, following the instructions from the wiki:

mario@hostname:~ $ git clone git@github.com:brave/brave-browser.git
Cloning into 'brave-browser'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 43226, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (48/48), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (31/31), done.
remote: Total 43226 (delta 32), reused 31 (delta 17), pack-reused 43178
Receiving objects: 100% (43226/43226), 16.51 MiB | 5.52 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (29950/29950), done.

mario@hostname:~ $ cd brave-browser
npm install

added 28 packages, and audited 29 packages in 2s

7 packages are looking for funding
  run `npm fund` for details

found 0 vulnerabilities

mario@hostname:~/brave-browser [git:master]$ npm run init

> brave@1.35.17 init
> node ./scripts/init.js

Performing initial checkout of brave-core
Cloning brave-core [undefined] into /home/mario/brave-browser/src/brave...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/home/mario/brave-browser/src/brave
> git clone  .

fatal: repository 'undefined' does not exist

I've done some investigation and, after finding a couple of bugs related to that, it seems that this intented behaviour from NPM >=6, as explained in RFC 21: https://github.com/npm/rfcs/blob/main/implemented/0021-reduce-lifecycle-script-environment.md

Turns out also that this is not yet an issue on NPM 7 because npm_package_config_* environment variables are still available for transitional purposes, but in NPM 8 (or at least from 8.1.0, the one I have) those variables are no longer availables, causing the error above.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Ensure you have NPM >= 8 installed
2. Try to initialize the brave-browser repo for the first time as explained in the wiki.

Actual result:

The npm run init process fails as described above.

Expected result:

The npm run init process succeeds and brave-browser, chromium and brave-core repositories are properly set up.

Reproduces how often:

Always

[mariospr]

For the sake of completeness, this is what you should see when running npm run init instead of the failure above:

mario@hostname:~ $ npm run init

> brave@1.35.17 init
> node ./scripts/init.js

Performing initial checkout of brave-core
Cloning brave-core [master] into /home/mario/brave-browser/src/brave...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/home/mario/brave-browser/src/brave
> git clone https://github.com/brave/brave-core.git .
[...]