Download readme on demand?

[FlorianWendelborn]

Would be nice if I could get a package's README without having that package as a dependency in my current working directory.

[eush77]

You mean something like npm-man?

I am not sure if this should be integrated into readme. The nice thing about readme is that it reads the same versions of packages that are used by your app. If we reach Npm or GitHub or some other source for readmes this will not be the case.

Do you have a strong feeling about this?

[FlorianWendelborn]

I'm not suggesting to change the default behavior. I'm suggesting this as a fallback, when no readme was found.

If I'm not mistaken most node devs actually use the most recent (or a really recent) package version, so it doesn't even make a difference in most cases.

I actually really prefer the readme style compared to npm-man, so this would be a welcome addition, even though npm-man seems to do something similar.

My main reason to do it like this is that I don't always work in the same directory the package is installed in. I'm working on multiple micro-services at the same time and they don't always have the same codebase/dependencies.

[hackergrrl]

Just wrote #19 before reading this. I think this is a reasonable feature to add. Maybe offer a -N switch for "no network" which can fast-fail, or the reverse: require a switch like -n to indicate a desire for a network download of the readme.