Multiple packages to avoid postinstall script

[corrideat]

Problem

Currently, we create chel as a single package and rely on an install script to download the correct binary. This approach is fragile because it requires the placeholder chel file, and also skips the integrity checks that npm provides. Some package managers like Deno also disable scripts by default.

As an alternative, see for example, https://www.npmjs.com/package/google-closure-compiler?activeTab=code (or esbuild). They create a package for each target and make it an optional dependency of the main package, with some small glue code to load the correct dependency. In the case of at least google-closure-compiler, this all seems possible to do without needing install scripts.

Solution

See if creating multiple packages would work for chel, especially to avoid having to rely on install scripts or to make the install process more robust.

[taoeffect]

Yeah the current approach also overrides the repo's bin/chel file when npm install so fixing that would be nice and this issue seems like it might do that.

[corrideat]

As it stands now, npm seems to require the file exists in the release before adding it to node_modules/.bin, which is why we have placeholder files for bin/chel. Now, we tried adding a .gitignore file to this bin directory.

(The intent then was that we could ignore all local changes, but that doesn't work, as explicitly tracking the file on git, which we need, means that it'll continue to be tracked, regardless of .gitignore).

However, adding .gitignore directives to ignore files under bin had a more direct breaking effect: the placeholders are now also ignored by npm when packing / publishing a release. Therefore, a .gitignore should not be used for the placeholder files: it doesn't have the desired effect of preventing accidental changes and it has the undesired effect of breaking releases.