Split up Node API and CLI

[necolas]

As is done with autoprefixer and autoprefixer-core. It's nice be able to install just the Node API because any module that wants to use this – or a complicated build process – is unlikely to use this tool's CLI.

[MoOx]

I've think about that too.
But I don't like the idea of a cssnext-core name.
What about a cssnext-cli than get the cli bin ?

[necolas]

yeah that was my first thought too - example of that approach would the karma and grunt projects

[MoOx]

Ok I've prepared something, but after thinking about it I'm unsure if it's nice to do that, mainly for maintenance. For example to test cli, I've to duplicate some fixtures in the cssnext-cli repo.
From what I remember when I checked grunt-cli (I've already made something similar in the past for another project), the "thing"-cli doesn't contains the cli logic, it's just a wrapper to the cli.
Confirmed by this
https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-cli/blob/6b9c34abbb08bd945fb52e9ae98c999377a44fd2/bin/grunt#L44-L45
And this
https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt/blob/master/lib/grunt/cli.js

So I'm unsure if it worth it. Grunt did that because it's mainly a cli tool & it helps to use different versions, but for example cssnext will mainly be used via nodejs directly & only occasionally run using cli or for testing purpose like you do it with suit preprocessor https://github.com/suitcss/components-grid/blob/master/package.json#L18-L19 & like I do with my poor cssrecipes.

We only have a simple bin, not a big deal don't you think ?

ps: autoprefixer did that because I were asking for a postcss-autoprefixer plugin only, & after a weird discussion, autoprefixer-core came out 💃
fyi

• I've create an postcss org postcss/postcss#65 (comment)
• Move core code to autoprefixer-core package postcss/autoprefixer#294

[necolas]

sgtm