Fix the python api in order to release none alpha versions

[samwillis]

As our release versions match that of the bundled node we can't ¹ update the API after we realise a none alpha version.

Therefore we need to ensure the API is fixed and will never change. I want to address these concerns first:

• We wrap the subprocess run, call, and Popen commands, do we want to wrap any others? Is there a way to make it forward compatible by inspecting and automatically wrapping the subprocess api?

• The path of the main 'node' command is available as from nodejs import node; node.path, this is nicely forward compatible. The other commands (npm, npx, corepack) do not currently make their path available as there are two different ways they work.

  • On Windows these are executables, and so we could easily make the path available
  • On Linux/Unix they are a js script that is run by node, this isn't easily made available as a path.

  The question is, do we convert path to a tuple in all cases (including for node), so for a simple executable it's just ('path/of/bin'), but for scripts it would be ('path/to/node', 'script/to/run')?
  This would ensure it's possible to retrieve the path/script and run with any other execution api.
  If we do this is there a better name then path? path_args, paths?

Footnotes

1. It is technically possible to update a package on PyPI with the same version by changing the build number, we should reserve this for replacing broken wheels. ↩