npm package about meteor

[Naatan]

The install is already a one liner, what more do you want?

curl install.meteor.com | /bin/sh

Also, since I'd imagine there's no way the 2 would ever be working together due to their scope, having a npm package would be very counter intuitive.

[speier]

Yes you are right. First I thought it could be easier to install on Windows via npm, but then I realized that node-fibers does not support Windows, so it won't work anyway.

[debergalis]

Thanks. We'll make install on Windows as easy as the other platforms once we get node-fibers.

The install is already a one liner, what more do you want?

When you publish to npm, you get something much more important than a one-line install: you get explicit easy versioning of dependencies. Being explicit about versions is very important for long-lived applications of the sort that I imagine people would be wanting to build with meteor.

Putting meteor on npm would let users specify their meteor version explicitly in their application's package.json which would make duplicating and porting the production environment much easier. By using the meteor version in node_modules/.bin instead of the global version everybody working on an application can have exactly the same version as production, even if they have a global install of meteor with a different version because npm run puts node_modules/.bin at the top of $PATH for you.

Further, putting meteor on npm with a proper top-level package.json would make versioning meteor's internal dependencies simpler since you could specify compatible ranges with semver syntax instead of hard-coding the module dependency versions inside of admin/generate_dev_bundle.sh and upgrading all of those in lock-step every release. Plus reusable chunks of meteor could be put on npm to improve the day-to-day maintenance of meteor itself by depending on subcomponents explicitly with semver ranges. This would let you make breaking changes in submodules in a controlled way where you can iterate on the subcomponents piece-wise without having to make all the changes to subcomponents always agree with the meteor core.