A tale of well-designed systems
A tale of well-designed systems
how one little joke can get so, so out of hand
Not entirely the usual fare, but i figured some here would appreciate it
I often rag on the js/node/npm ecosystem for being utter garbage, and this post is a quite a full demonstration of many of the shortcomings and outright total design failures present in that space
The commenters on HN and lobste.rs are generally on the side of the package creators, with the view that NPM is run by GitHub, who is owned by Microsoft. All this is true, but it doesn't follow from that that the NPM people are paid fuck-you money. I suspect they're understaffed, and overworked, and that this stunt didn't make them very happy.
Although in retrospect, not anticipating that some rando would try to depend on everything in the repository seems like a naive view on human nature.
- If they are understaffed - Microsoft is trying to sell itself as OSS friendly, so they have absolutely zero excuse for not putting enough resources into something this load-bearing and this historically shitty.
- If they are well-funded, what the fuck is that money being spent on, ChatNPM?
- Npm was acquired by GitHub in 2020. It has been an utter dumpster fire for its entire history. Being acquired by Microsoft doesn't absolve you from having created the tool Satan the Lord of Hell will use to break the Seventh Seal and bring upon a thousand years of darkness upon humanity.
A really good lesson on offline backups of things like issue trackers, though.
when I first did this for a project a couple of years ago, the github api endpoint for this sucked extremely bad. I no longer remember all the details but it was something like 3 different sets of things you had to get to make sure you had somewhat of a full picture. might be better these days. and even then it's still only the first piece in the puzzle
but yeah, by and large a rather extreme percentage of the modern industry is extremely dependent on a vary narrow scope of SPoFs, and may are clueless about how to even approach this. 2 decades of computer-renting, yay!
Okay, I might be brainfarting here, but... why is blocking _un_publishing such a big deal? I understand that it might be annoying, but this talks about it like it broke the fucking system, as if it was as important as actually publishing packages.
How often do people in JS world unpublish packages?
seems like a perfectly normal thing to do to me. maybe you uploaded it under the wrong account, or licensing change, or need to do a security- or danger-related retraction, or ...
hell, maybe you just changed your mind! that's allowed too! or should be