allow building from source

[selfisekai]

closes #35

[Hywan]

Oh neat! Thanks for the patch. Looks good so far. What does it need to get out of the draft?

[selfisekai]

i haven't tested it as an npm release yet, just from git

[mqudsi]

It would be nice to have this as a default fallback when prebuilt binaries aren't available for the current platform/architecture, without npm install --build-from-source or env npm_config_build_from_source= yarn install.

[richvdh]

Sadly this seems to have been bitrotting for two years.

It looks like we should probably merge something similar to this, but I have a few thoughts:

• Rather than cluttering up the project directory with scripts, is there any reason we can't combine download-lib.js and postinstall.js into a single file?
• I'm minded to agree with @mqudsi that it would be nice to fall back to building from source automatically; however this isn't essential provided we document the necessary steps.
• Either way, the README needs an update.

@selfisekai if you're still out there, do you think you could give this an update?

Otherwise maybe someone else would like to pick up this work?

[richvdh]

This file needs a comment describing what it does.