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NPM Is Joining GitHub

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101–110 of 588 posts

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#102
post #79

I hope this doesn't alter the current GitHub npm package registry policy where all packages must be published under a scope corresponding to name of the owning GitHub user/org. The resulting increased transparency and clarity of ownership will be great for the JS ecosystem. The existing npm ownership model is markedly less clear and has led to several problems, including the transfer of package publishing rights to b…

Does this mean using alternatives (GitLab, et. al) is not an option?

The worst option has been Elm's system where the whole package system requires you to not only use GitHub, but when GitHub in down (which isn't uncommon unfortunately) packages that weren't cached locally were inaccessible with no mirroring options.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#103

I'm surprised there's not a single mention of "Microsoft" in this or the npm announcement [1], given the old-evil-history of Microsoft and the new-nice Microsoft we have today. I would expect that there was at least a mention, considering the reason that most modules in npm are still in ES5 is exactly because of the monopolistic practices that Microsoft followed back in the day which makes Internet Explorer still rel…

My fear might probably be unfounded, but NPM is an integral part of the JS ecosystem. And given MicroSoft has .NET Core, I have a strange feeling that they'll concentrate on npm less.

Product Manager at GitHub here - I'll be the Product Manager for npm when the acquisition closes. I agree - npm is definitely an integral part of the JavaScript ecosystem. The npm package registry will remain free for public projects. We're going to work to ensure that the service is stable and accessible, and ready to serve the next million packages.

This is independent of what Microsoft's doing with .NET Core. I'm excited about the work that they're doing, but this isn't going to stop us from making sure that npm is outstanding.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#104
post #70

Heh, I called this 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838122 Somebody replied "Microsoft won't acquire npm for sure."

Wow, congrats! You are amazing! I can't believe someone disagreed with your prediction.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#105
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft turned their reputation around in recent years with developers but I wonder how long it will last.

I think people are "okay" with Microsoft because so many hackers have a problem with the data agglomeration and monetization strategy of Google and Facebook, but this Microsoft "embrace" will come to a head within the next couple years and I just can't wait for it. The way people think Microsoft's embrace of open source, GitHub, and now NPM is genuine is completely ridiculous. Microsoft had to change because much of…

I can't even come up with a scenario of how MS would realistically do so? Sure, making GH actions easier to set up with Azure than AWS seems plausible, but also strikes me as somewhat benign.

Banning python from Github? Requiring \r\n for NPM packages? What's the move you're afraid of?

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I installed Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on an older machine just now. The MSFT of today is definitely a far cry from the MSFT of yesteryear. Such a thing would have been unheard of 15 years ago.

Embrace, extend, extinguish?

Currently in the embrace phase ...

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I installed Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on an older machine just now. The MSFT of today is definitely a far cry from the MSFT of yesteryear. Such a thing would have been unheard of 15 years ago.

Embrace, extend, extinguish?

How would MS possibly extinguish linux?

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I installed Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on an older machine just now. The MSFT of today is definitely a far cry from the MSFT of yesteryear. Such a thing would have been unheard of 15 years ago.

Embrace, extend, extinguish?

My prediction, that my IT department hates to hear, is that Windows is going away.

Microsoft doesn't want to be Microsoft anymore; it wants to be Oracle and IBM and primarily make money off of business consulting and the cloud.

I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux, similar to the way macOS became Unix, but even less different than its underlying OS.

However, it should be noted that I'm not very good at predicting things.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was already consolidated. The vast majority of public npm packages are already hosted on Github. The dependency on them has been there since the beginning.

Yes, indeed - and the dependency is literally right there on the technical level. For years, you've been able to specify a version of a package as a github repo's branch HEAD. npm i some-package username/repo#branchName

Bonus points:

    npm install username/repo#semver:^1.2.3
The big problem is that lots of Node.js modules don't push their tags, so there are issues on lots of repos begging maintainers to push their Git tags so that we don't have to use the npm registry.

JavaScript is an interpreted language -- as long as you're only downloading source code from the registry there's really no reason to use a registry instead of the plain old Git repository.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#110
post #25

Thanks to Microsoft/GitHub for this acquisition. NPM is essential to the Javascript eco-system and it is hard to have a business model for just a registry. In the ruby eco-system the awesome Ruby Together https://rubytogether.org/ was started to run the registry. In this case one of the worlds most valuable companies will run it, which means it doesn't need a not-for-profit. Regarding "trace a change from a GitHub pu…

Just to clarify, RubyCentral http://rubycentral.org is running the RubyGems registry.

Thanks for that clarification, I was not aware of that. Thanks RubyCentral!
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