npm package contains a lot of unnecessary things

[cztomsik]

I have no idea if this was intended or not (I hope it was not), but node_modules/mithril/dist/ takes 18M, mostly because of archive being there (with lots of *.md and *.html files)

You can verify easily here https://unpkg.com/browse/mithril@2.0.4/dist/archive/

[orbitbot]

I've noted that there was a lot of files around as well, but never that all that came with the default install. It should be a fairly simple fix with a files section in package.json, if someone feels like chipping in.

[dead-claudia]

The bulk of npm download and install times come from dependency resolution (an NP-hard problem for even the most contrived case) combined with the large number of connections and requests it has to make because npm establishes a whole new connection for each request it makes to the server and all the data it has to parse to get that data. It doesn't come from install size.

Also, most of the size overhead from comes from duplicate versions - like people importing two different versions of Lodash. This doesn't happen nearly as much with Mithril for the same reason it's rare to see multiple React or Angular installations - you need exactly one source of truth, and libraries that depend on Mithril always list them as peer dependencies, instead of normal dependencies.

It's also worth noting that @angular/core itself is about as large as ours

---

That aside, I wouldn't be against stripping /archive/ from the bundle* - there's no valid reason to ship that on npm. Feel free to file a pull request adding that to our .npmignore - I wouldn't consider it breaking as it was never documented and there's no good reason to rely on it in the npm bundle itself. We've already removed other, larger things like the tests and their associated helpers, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was just an oversight at some point.

* I do want to keep the current /docs/ with it, for offline reference and in case the project ever goes defunct for whatever reason. This shouldn't amount to more than a few MB at most.