This relates to #3059 but since that has been closed and shut down from any further interaction I will open a new issue.

The reason for calling pre-publish when initially installing local dependencies just fails me.

It might make sense to call upon pre-publish when one uses npm to install a given package from the local filesystem, but even that seems to be out of line, since the package is not going to be published to the package registry.

Please reconsider this design decision as some people require the pre-publish hook to prevent a package from being published unless some other mechanism than npm publish is being used.

I am able to overcome this by implementing a pre-publish hook such as

  "scripts": {
     "prepublish": "echo ${npm_config_argv} | grep 'install' >/dev/null 2>/dev/null || (echo 'use *make publish* or *npm update* instead' && exit 1)"
   },

in order to prevent myself from running npm publish before a proper make dist including running available tests and checking for overall coverage and linting the existing sources and so on.

However, this seems to complicate things for less experienced users.

Another reason for you to reconsider your design decision should be that by making the user implement such hooks will limit the build system to a single platform, which is either windows or *nix.