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Why the hell does npm support a postinstall script? There really shouldn't be a need to run arbitrary code provided by the package for something like this.

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The package itself is arbitrary code. You're running arbitrary code either way whether it's preinstall, install, post install, or when the package code gets ran.

It's common to need to setup tool chains for code that gets compiled (i.e. a node module that adds language bindings to a C library)

It also supports preinstall and install scripts, for more obvious reasons.

I don't really think thats more obvious. It's expected to install dev libraries, not system services, it shouldn't have that need.

dependency checking isn't simple

NodeJS isn't very sandboxed. Many "dev libraries" are native and will either download and link to binary blobs, or build e.g. C code, which AFAICT is what all the various install scripts are for.

It seems like a bad design choice, that, besides allowing for running untrusted code directly at download time, also makes it difficult to properly mirror artifacts, and I'd assume, make platform portability inconsistent, at best.

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