Allow package to be published in npm registry

[tschaub]

I've contacted the maintainer of the https://www.npmjs.org/package/openlayers package (in addition to the npm folks) to see if we can take over ownership. Until then, we can publish packages under the name 'ol'.

Once the process is ironed out, I'll document package publishing as part of the release process. I'd like to publish (frequent) pre-releases under the next tag. That will allow anyone using npm to install the latest pre-release with npm install ol@next.

A manual set of publishing steps will look something like this:

# increment the version in package.json to something like 3.1.0-pre.5
npm publish --tag next

We can create git tags for pre-releases if we want to as well (though not required). This should not interfere with the normal release process, it is only intended as a way to let people use ol3 with the npm registry.

[elemoine]

That makes sense. Shouldn't we use "openlayers3" or "ol3" as a package name?

What will the node distribution include? Full build? Source code + build tools? Both? (Both would make sense to me.)

Also, I've ben wondering if adding a smaller, Leaflet-like, build would make sense. Have you considered this as well?

[tschaub]

That makes sense. Shouldn't we use "openlayers3" or "ol3" as a package name?

Ideally (I think), we'd use openlayers as the package name. Package name and version are handled independently. We can publish versions 2.99.1 or 4.74.5 or whatever under the same package name. Until openlayers is available, I think it makes sense to use ol. We should be able to get the openlayers package name before long (they ask that we wait ~4 weeks before taking over an abandoned package name). So we might have a few pre-releases published as ol and then future releases will be under openlayers.

What will the node distribution include? Full build? Source code + build tools? Both? (Both would make sense to me.)

Agreed. I think the package will be most useful if it includes full sources for people to generate their own builds. We can also publish dist artifacts if we decide on commonly used build profiles. This can evolve over time.

Also, I've ben wondering if adding a smaller, Leaflet-like, build would make sense. Have you considered this as well?

Yes. We can have task that generates dist/ol-light.js or whatever before publishing. Again, I think this can evolve over time. Perhaps our initial packages include the full source and tools to build. And later we can add custom builds to the package.

[tschaub]

That makes sense.

I'll take this as "ok to merge." Let me know if this is a misinterpretation. This change has no immediate effect on anything else, so I think it should be non-contentious.

[elemoine]

Sure.