Hi all, I maintain the claude-code package [1] on AUR along with ticpu.
Claude Code is not an open source project. For most of the project's lifespan, it has been distributed only as an npm package [2], which contains only minified javascript. Recently, a "binary" version was released which appears to use the same code as released on npm, but bundled into a standalone executable using `bun build --compile` [3]. The official docs [4] now seem to prefer installing the standalone binary, though the option to install through npm is still available. I recently switched the package to use the distributed bun binary, rather than the minified npm package, since this seems to now be the installation method preferred by upstream. However, this raises an interesting question - should the package now be called "claude-code- bin" instead of "claude-code"? The logic here is that the "-bin" suffix should be used if a source- based package is available. In this case, the npm package would be such a "source-based" package. I personally find this argument uncompelling, as minified code doesn't really seem comparable to actual source code. The npm package and the distributed binary have essentially the same visibility into the underlying code that is being run - you could use `strings` or other methods to extract the minified code from the binary version. There's a second argument which is more compelling to me, that some users may prefer the npm-based installation, so it would be useful to have two different AUR packages. In this case, the new binary-based package could be called "claude-code-bin", and the previous npm-based package could be just "claude-code". (Of course, other naming schemes could be used, e.g. "claude-code" and "claude-code-npm".) Personally, I don't see great value in having two separate packages and the opportunity for user disruption seems high, but I'd love to hear people's opinions on this. This boils down to two questions: 1. Is it _against the package naming rules_ to call this package "claude- code" rather than "claude-code-bin"? 2. Do people think that this package _should_ be split into separate packages for the two installation methods, and if so, what should the packages be called? Thanks for your consideration, Christopher [1]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/claude-code [2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anthropic-ai/claude-code [3]: https://bun.com/docs/bundler/executables [4]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview
