This is just a dummy package to install only the devDependencies needed to run
the command-line interface.
It is intended to be installed globally with npm install -g
(or via a Linux
distribution's package manager) to make the library's command-line interface
available anywhere on the system.
It avoids two problems:
-
The dependencies only used by the CLI can be put in as devDependencies
,
so they don't have to be installed when the library is used by other
projects, where the CLI isn't used anyway.
-
All the other devDependencies (like the test framework and linting tools)
don't get installed like they would if the library itself was installed in
dev mode.
-
The CLI can still be distributed with the core library so it can be easily
used during development for testing new features.