[matthewbauer]

Wouldn't that have issues with Windows? I'm not a huge fan of NPM but it works really well when you want to be cross platform.

[mwcampbell]

npm only works well for Windows if the program you're distributing is itself in JavaScript using Node. If you're using npm to distribute a shell script, then you still need a Unixy environment for Windows like Cygwin or MSYS, and in that case, autotools is probably no worse.