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Many packages suddenly disappeared

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141–150 of 520 posts

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#141
post #38

And ppl think i'm crazy for keeping packages in SCM repo. NPM get so much abuse, people depending on them without paying a dime. At least put up a caching proxy hosted by your own if you depend so much on npm for your operations.

I've been thinking that it's a good idea to do that lately...

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#142
post #33

I don't remember the intricacies of NPM or Yarn, but don't one/both of them have resource integrity enabled, so that you know that the package that's being installed is the one in your lock file? If not, why isn't this a feature especially after the clusterfuck of the guy deleting all his packages back about two years ago, breaking tons of things including Babel and React? This wouldn't fix the issue of someone delet…

Can you link me to the incident where a person deleted their packages and broke Babel? I'd love to read about it. Edit: grammar

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11300840/how-an-irate-dev...

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#143
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link me to the incident where a person deleted their packages and broke Babel? I'd love to read about it. Edit: grammar

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11300840/how-an-irate-dev...

Thanks.

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#144
post #101
post #5

PSA: Please be cautious because this is an excellent opportunity for taking over packages and injecting malware by malicious people. Example: https://www.npmjs.com/package/duplexer3 which has 4M monthly downloads just reappeared, published by a fresh npm user. They published another two versions since then, so it's possible they've initially republished unchanged package, but now are messing with the code. Previously…

maybe it's time to push for adding signed packages to npm long discussion here: https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/29

I am very surprised that a package manager of this calibre and impact abstains from best practices when it comes to authentication through code-signing. Other package managers are miles ahead of NPM. For example, Nix, which uses immutability and hashing to always produce the same artifact, regardless of changes of the sources.

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It badfles me that technologists commonly complain about new technology. As far as I can tell your complaint boils down to “people should stop making and switching to new things”.. I find it hard to understand why someone with this attitude would be a technologist of any kind, and I find the attitude really obnoxious.

Because each thing has a constant price in learning effort that is familiarizing yourself with its idiosyncrasies, which you have to pay even if you're experienced in the domain. When tools constantly get replaced instead of improved, you keep paying that price all the time.

It’s a drop-in replacement CLI tool. Let’s not be dramatic.

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#146
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does "stalinist" work?

Dunno, but it's quite hard to resist childish urges. I note that "jew" is still available, and .jew is a perfectly valid extension which no program has ever claimed. I love all cultures. There's something worth learning from each of them, if you try. But emergent social dynamics are deeply interesting too: I get it (everyone does), and it makes perfect sense. Yet we've all collectively agreed that those are unwholeso…

> And you'll find it difficult to turn "Forget" into a file extension.

I must be missing something, but wouldn't .forget be the file extension you're looking for?

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#147
post #5

PSA: Please be cautious because this is an excellent opportunity for taking over packages and injecting malware by malicious people. Example: https://www.npmjs.com/package/duplexer3 which has 4M monthly downloads just reappeared, published by a fresh npm user. They published another two versions since then, so it's possible they've initially republished unchanged package, but now are messing with the code. Previously…

Detailed description what you could do with a malicious npm package is currently on he front page: "Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084575

am I the only one who thinks this could be more than a coincidence?

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They document that they curate package names here: https://www.npmjs.com/policies/conduct I guess lots of people will think that a policy like Avoid using offensive or harassing package names, nicknames, or other identifiers that might detract from a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all. stifles their inner something or other though.

seems like a good reflection of the current social climate: they have a policy to prevent mildly offensive package names, and they enforce it, but they don't have a solution to packages randomly disappearing and being replaced with malicious versions.

The term "nazi" is not simply mildly offensive, there are likely legal implications if you want to serve users in Germany.

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#149
post #33

I don't remember the intricacies of NPM or Yarn, but don't one/both of them have resource integrity enabled, so that you know that the package that's being installed is the one in your lock file? If not, why isn't this a feature especially after the clusterfuck of the guy deleting all his packages back about two years ago, breaking tons of things including Babel and React? This wouldn't fix the issue of someone delet…

Can you link me to the incident where a person deleted their packages and broke Babel? I'd love to read about it. Edit: grammar

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/

left-pad was a package to, you guessed it, pad a string with n leading characters. Personally, I've always just written my own 2 line function for it (something like `function pad(s, n, ch) { return new Array(n - s.length).fill(ch).join("") + s; }`), but a bunch of packages either directly or indirectly depended on this left-pad package, so they all broke.

Re: Many packages suddenly disappeared

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It badfles me that technologists commonly complain about new technology. As far as I can tell your complaint boils down to “people should stop making and switching to new things”.. I find it hard to understand why someone with this attitude would be a technologist of any kind, and I find the attitude really obnoxious.

JS ecosystem is pretty well know for changing very fast compared to other mainstream languages. This is a fair point, NPM could implement the local cache without (hopefully) breaking anything

From my understanding they’ve always had one, but until npm@5 it wasn’t safe for concurrent access (side note: Maven still isn’t) and was prone to corruption. I think they’re making their way toward true offline cacheing a-la yarn, if they haven’t done so already.
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