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NPM Is Joining GitHub

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Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#371
post #164

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Repos have been able to provide artifacts since forever ago; they just don’t sit in the tree. While you can commit from an action, I’m not sure that’s a great idea.

You're right, artifacts in GitHub repos have been around a long time. I suppose what I was missing was a way to point to a specific built artifact (like a tar.gz from a release) as a dependency, from package.json. As far as I know, it's not possible yet with npm. I can imagine that will be covered somehow with deeper integration of GitHub and the NPM package repository.

Yes, this has always been possible. Just specify the tarball url instead of a version or range.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#372
post #125

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I do not consider the largest distributor of proprietary, closed-source spyware (Windows) owning the fastest growing open source package manager to be a good outcome, personally.

It depends on what the alternative is. When NPM starts running out of money to run the service what would happen? More VC, but only to a point and the firms would be increasingly be influencing NPM to make money by any means(probably not good for anyone but the firms). Alternatively a cash strapped NPM fails to invest in security and availability of the service leading to widespread outages or worse a large scale sup…

The alternative is that the entire source control system (GitHub) and the entire artifact registry (npm) are run by a giant multinational military defense contractor with close and longstanding ties to the US military. Did we forget so soon that the Snowden slides are PowerPoint?

I'm not sure that's an improvement in any way whatsoever.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#373
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what the alternative is. When NPM starts running out of money to run the service what would happen? More VC, but only to a point and the firms would be increasingly be influencing NPM to make money by any means(probably not good for anyone but the firms). Alternatively a cash strapped NPM fails to invest in security and availability of the service leading to widespread outages or worse a large scale sup…

This is sad to read. Why does every project have to be profitable? If NPM is useful users (companies and people) can invest time or cash to support the operations and continued development. This foundation model has been successful across open source and prevents one company from changing the direction of a project to fit their own needs at the expense of everyone else. I think this was critical to the continued grow…

Profitable of not, they should not run out of money.

Would yo prefer npm infrastructure to be maintained and developed by the lowest-paid programmers they could hire?

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#374
post #252

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> NPM being such an important pillar in the software supply chain while having an unviable business model and largely being funded by VC money was never a good position to be in. Why does NPM need to be funded as a commercial entity at all? What other open source library has a private company running its package manager? This one still boggles my mind.

Confused why you think a service servings millions or billions of requests a day wouldn't require money to run. Do you think some grant magically appear out of thin air to pay for the servers, storage, bandwidth, and maintenance?

We've been doing fine here in reality, where most Linux distros, Perl's CPAN, Python's PyPi, RubyGems, etc. are all run by volunteers and donations. There is nothing special about NPM that requires it to be owned by a for-profit corporation. If Wikipedia and Archive.org can get by, I'm sure NPM can too.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#375

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yarn v1+ or yarn v2/berry? Switching to berry has been a huge PITA over here, but I don't want to give up workspaces

Our 'workspace' is so ornate that yarn couldn't handle it. 1.21+ almost looks right, but something very bad is still going on with mocha deduping, such that tests are failing with really bizarre error messages. I check yarn about every three months, or when I find a new, infuriating bug with the npm CLI (so, every couple of months on average). I think npm install suffers greatly from not having a formal spec. It has…

Your take on the installer in npm v6 is not wrong. It got that way by a process of gradual iterative evolution, and it has lots of warts.

npm v7 features a ground-up rewrite of the tree resolution and deification logic in the @npmcli/arborist module. I recommend checking it out, or at least staying tuned for the beta coming soon.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#376
post #273

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The time for GitHub is over. I have moved all of my repositories away from there that do not depend on GitHub-only integrated services, and am migrating my DNS and domains/hosting off of those integrated services this week. You should too. If you work there, you should quit. https://sneak.berlin/20200307/the-case-against-microsoft-and... VS Code has had to fork to remove the unethical spyware portions within it place…

Just for reference, vscodium is not a fork to remove Microsoft's code - it is just a build tool for the open source repo as explained in the README. "When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license…

> Just for reference, vscodium is not a fork to remove Microsoft's code - it is just a build tool for the open source repo as explained in the README.

When a certain build configuration enables major spyware features, and that is the build configuration for the released version by the first party, and another build configuration (that is not released by the first party) disables those major spyware features, the distinction between a fork/patch and a "different build configuration" becomes semantically meaningless.

It's a fork, regardless of how they care to present it. The result of the build configuration is embedded in the release. Consider it a "binary fork" if you don't like considering json "source code".

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#377
post #277
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NPM being such an important pillar in the software supply chain while having an unviable business model and largely being funded by VC money was never a good position to be in. Why does NPM need to be funded as a commercial entity at all? What other open source library has a private company running its package manager? This one still boggles my mind.

For programming languages, there are several examples of commercially run package managers: - the Java/Kotlin/Scala ecosystem is based around maven central, which is run by Sonatype, Inc. - Go modules are hosted by Google. Previously, most libraries were hosted on Github - Rust's crate index is on Github - The Docker/Moby registry is run by Docker, Inc. (though that might be a stretch for "package manager" :))

> Rust's crate index is on Github

Note that the crates.io index is just a single git repo that holds JSON metadata about each crate: https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index . The actual code found on crates.io is hosted on S3. The index is an important part of the system, but there's nothing tying it to Github specifically.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#378
post #253

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> It depends on what the alternative is. Ruby Gems, PHP composer, PIP, etc. would all like a word with you.... https://rubygems.org/pages/sponsors https://www.python.org/psf/

Yeah, and the PSF is worried that the possible cancellation of PyCon could send the whole foundation broke. The fact that there's a bunch of critical infra run on a precarious volunteer shoestring is not a good thing.

Maybe look in your node_modules folder sometime, eh? Or the Linux kernel. The whole world runs their critical infrastructure on volunteer work.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before someone else comes along and writes a monologue, the biggest downside might be how it handled (didn't break) its contract with ICE[0]. If the acquisition didn't happen, old GitHub might've dropped the contract immediately upon enough employees speaking about it. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21412600

That's a subjective political opinion of a far-left vocal minority. Not everyone has an issue with ICE (a federal law-enforcement agency that stops criminals and saves lives) nor finds a problem with a company legally providing services to the government.

>That's a subjective political opinion of a far-left vocal minority

What you are talking about is Right-wing politics, even if they are extremely far to the left of your -and the majority of peoples political view -in the USA. Both parties in the US are on the right. This isn't Reddit where the state of US politics is the default norm when it differs from most of planet earth. Though HN is quickly getting there.

Re: NPM Is Joining GitHub

#380
post #298

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As a former Sun employee I love this comment, but in all fairness Sun did have its own level of sleaze in the C suite (neither Eric Schmidt nor Scott McNealy would really do well as ethical leader exemplars) That said, I'm thinking Moon Microsystems :-) Not as big or as hot as Sun. (ok that is a bad punalogy) I did get the domain though, it was available and I couldn't resist.

Under certain conditions, can eclipse the the Sun. "Eclipse" ... now there is a name I haven't heard in a long time. But can you make a cool logo out of "Moon"?

> But can you make a cool logo out of "Moon"?

No, but with minor butchery you can re-use the Sun logo with the letters MMS (Moon Micro Systems) :-)

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