npm distribution

[aoberoi]

Description

Filing this on behalf of another user who delivered this feedback in person.

It would make it much nicer for node developers to be able to retrieve steno as part of their application's devDependencies, and since steno is built on node, its feasible to get it there.

The main concern I have is that this means steno would have to support more node versions (probably at least as far back as node support/maintenance goes, which is currently lts/argon).

Its really convenient and low-cost to only be concerned with one node runtime, and to know that all users have a specific version of the binary. When installing via npm, by the nature of semver and version resolution, its hard to predict what an end user might end up with.

Requirements (place an x in each of the [ ])

• I've read and understood the Contributing guidelines and have done my best effort to follow them.
• I've read and agree to the Code of Conduct.
• I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

[aoberoi]

if we were to do this, and we wanted steno to be available as a library (not just an executable in bin), then many @types/* entries inside the package.json key "devDependencies" should be moved to "dependencies".

[Zertz]

I created stenode, a small package to make steno easier to use, but making steno itself available on npm would be a lot more convenient!

[aoberoi]

@Zertz this looks really cool, thanks for sharing 😄