Release as npm module

[ryanblock]

<3

Happy to lend a hand if you like. Would make consuming this dataset – especially versioning! – much easier in Node.js environments.

[hyperknot]

I was thinking about it a lot.

Advantages:

• npm upgrade works without looking up releases in GitHub

Disadvantages:

• Why is NPM special, over PIP or Ruby gems or some other package manager? If we release on NPM we should release on PIP as well.
• These are JSON files, not related to any particular programming language.
• Needs to be 4 packages, not 1. For NPM and PIP it'd be 8 packages in total.
• NPM has problems with uploading big releases. Stackoverflow has some hacks using curl.
• Need to write a versioning + release implementation.
• Need to maintain all those 8 packages in npm and pip.

All in all, I concluded that it's not worth the effort just to avoid looking up the version number in GitHub.