Interesting that npm is being used to deploy a regular old CLI application that has essentially nothing to do with javascript development. Are we seeing the future of package management with these distribution-agnostic tools?
No, you're just seeing javascript come into its own as a general purpose language community. The surprising part isn't that it's being shipped in npm, it's more that people like programming these sorts of tools in javascript.
This sort of thing is common in Ruby and Python-land. And infinitely better than the `curl foo.io/trolol.sh | sh` we've seen emerge in the last couple of years.
Install from NodeJS.org it comes with npm. Note: this tool is apparently linux centric. You should have a development environment (c++, make, etc) installed as well as Python 2.7 in order to work with development modules.
As some module mature, they do offer bre-built binaries as needed.
