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When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 (socket.dev)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This situation is due to npm's policy shift following the infamous "left-pad" incident in 2016, where a popular package left-pad was removed, grinding development to a halt across much of the developer world. In response, npm tightened its rules around unpublishing, specifically preventing the unpublishing of any package that is used by another package.

This already seems like a pretty strange approach, and takes away agency from package maintainers. What if you accidentally published something you want to remove..? It kind of turns npm into a very centralized system.

If they don't want to allow hard-removals because of this, why not let people unpublish packages into a soft/hidden state instead? Maybe mark them with the current dependencies, but don't allow new ones - or something

I prefer the approach of Azure DevOps more. When you publish any nuget, or npm into their system, the entire package dependency tree is pulled in and backed up there. So you don't rely on NPM anymore to keep your referenced packages safe

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Cargo.rs also has no option to unpublish a package. There is however the option to yank a package which disables the inclusion in new projects by the automated dependency resolution. If the version is entered manually it will still be used.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I feel like you could also give the maintainers the power to "re-publish" using a different verified maintainer so that if such a thing does happen, it can be reversed without input from the maintainer that originally pulled it. I don't know enough about the system to really know if this is a good idea tho.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Yeah then you’ve got security problems. If a maintainer pulls a package, you wouldn’t want some rando able to push a new one in its place.