Do not commit build artifacts

[dmethvin-gov]

For a fleeting moment we had a git pre-push hook in place but it didn't do what we wanted anyway.

If we are going to commit build artifacts with every commit, we need some way to ensure that they exactly represent the source committed along with them. It's a bit tricky, the CI can't do it because it's too late by then. We need to have each PR rebased against master at the point where it's landed and then rebuild the artifacts before committing. I don't see any GitHub hooks or API to do that. It's doable if one of us lands the PRs manually.

One possibility is to not commit built artifacts except on production. That wouldn't affect users of the library since they should be using versioned releases that would still include build artifacts. There are cons to that since it makes testing PRs a two-step process (you have to build after pulling).

[AndrewRayCode]

You don't need to commit anything since this is an npm package

If you want to provide a binary download, have maintainers compile a new version when the package.json version is bumped and upload it to a CDN. Cirlce could probably do this too automatically in response to detection of package.json version changes

[jcmeloni-usds]

@dmethvin-gov Did we land on a strategy/plan? I've never been a fan of committing any build artifacts, but don't know the backstory here if there's a reason that we started doing it and it needs to stay.

[dmethvin-gov]

I completely agree, I'd prefer to not commit any. Right now vets.gov is pulling in builds via a GitHub hash so they needed it in the past, but I think it's safe to get rid of them now. The npm releases will have everything built.

After our discussions with the vets.gov team yesterday I have some thoughts about how to do this, once we've finished Phase 1 I can get this done.