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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Programming
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Node packaging is fucked. Node packaging remains fucked. And we have fucked it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the makers of all unmaintainable spaghetti? What was webscale and most utilitarian of all that the computers have yet executed has ground to a halt under our keyboards: who will wipe this blood off us?
I am sorry, but as a noobie user of npm I don't understand. It works pretty well for me if you use it normally for what it is supposed for.
If used in larger systems it can be a pain to maintain code bases as you could install an innocuous package but that package may depend on 100 other packages which in turn could have other dependencies and it cascades.
This can introduce bugs into your code which can be a pain to resolve.
Isn't this a problem with every package/library system? Is there really a solution to this that doesn't limit packages with how they handle their dependencies?
This may also be about trust. npm probably could limit a number of dependencies that a single package can have with an arbitrary limit, but they don't do that, because they trust the developers they won't misuse their options. Well...
Thats a good question and I’m not sure to be honest.
We use NPM at work client side for React Typescript and Nuget server side for C# .net and all I know is the senior always complains about NPM but not NuGet I do believe the backend is less package reliant on our applications so maybe that’s why it’s not as bad.
I'm curious if you mean this one issue talked about in the article is the only reason why node packaging is "fucked" or do you have any citations you can provide that point out other issues with it?
I feel this is just a natural progression of how the developers wanted it to function and this is an opportunity to resolve it.
Better that this is done by mistake and resolved than it being used in a malicious attack.
It’s the cascading nature of the dependencies. You could install a single package that might directly or indirectly depend on 100’s of other packages, which can introduce bugs into existing code bases which can be difficult to fix as you have no control over another library or dependency.