Retire binary hlx distribution

[stefan-guggisberg]

Overview

Recent binary hlx releases are all broken. The last know to work release is v0.13.8. See related issues:

• hlx build of demo project fails  #654
• Tests are failing on Node 8.3 #657
• [hlx deploy] "Segmentation fault error" when using hlx deploy #687
• Attaching a debugger crashes hlx #689

Details

The binary hlx executable is build using node-packer. node-packer embeds Node 8.3 runtime within the native executable.

As of #397 (0528466) Node >=8.9 is required to run the CLI.

OTOH the node-packer project is abandoned, the current release is 2 years old (bundling Node 8.3 runtime). I forked the project and ported the runtime to 8.15 and 10.15, only to run into new issues (e.g. #687, #689, failure to load native addons, etc). There are potentially a lot more issues. Fixing those issues would require a deep dive into v8, libuv, libsquash and Node core C/C++ code, hardly worth the effort.

While there are other projects which create native executables from node apps (pkg, enclose, nexe, electron etc) none of them work for helix-cli (lack of native addon support, no dynamic requires, etc).

Proposed Actions

I suggest we stop providing binary hlx builds, at least until we find a viable solution.
This would mean we remove any reference from READMEs, docs etc and remove the build job on CircleCi.

[stefan-guggisberg]

resolved according to proposal

[tripodsan]

@stefan-guggisberg I think this file is no longer needed, correct?
https://github.com/adobe/helix-cli/blob/master/cli_install.sh

[stefan-guggisberg]

fixed in de2c914