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Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps

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Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stale libraries are more likely to contain known security vulnerabilities.

I know it's bad practice, but I just checkin vendor files/libs to source control. Makes auditing new releases of libraries a bit easier. Assuming they aren't binaries of course.

I don't recommend this approach

Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps

#113
What’s the fix here?

Maintainers should be able to do whatever they want either their code

But if they vandalize their modules that should be a lifetime ban from the registry

It’s pretty obvious that node needs a better method for dealing with this by now

Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps

#114
Try to look at it from another point of view. Marak is fed up of all these billion dollar companies (and other small projects) using his code, he has some financial problems and so he decides to teach them a lesson. I sympathize and for sure if I were responsible for a big company and I was using an open source component/project I would donate something. We all have to rethink of how the open source funding is supposed to work and have some Fortune 500 c9mpanies start giving back to people that deserve it.

Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for npm. After the incident with leftpad, you can't unpublish anymore. You can, however, publish a new patch update that completely breaks everything.

> This is true for npm. After the incident with leftpad, you can't unpublish anymore. You can, however, publish a new patch update that completely breaks everything. You absolutely can unpublish, it just requires more steps. If NPM gets a DMCA takedown request they will absolutely have to fulfill it.

Not only does it require more steps, it also has to meet the following criteria[1]:

* no other packages in the npm Public Registry depend on

* had less than 300 downloads over the last week

* has a single owner/maintainer

So while your point is taken that unpublishing is possible under some circumstances, it is not for popular packages that are in use today.

[1] https://docs.npmjs.com/policies/unpublish

Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps

#116
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What damage did they cause?

Do you really expect anyone to believe that you're asking that in good faith?

Hey you're the one stating they caused damage. They printed some zaglo strings. Hard to see how that damages anything other than making a few CI jobs fail.

Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps

#118

> now what stop trying to save a couple of bucks by reusing functionality that's not that hard to just develop in-house maybe?

only helps if people developing the functionality that is difficult to develop in-house do the same. i'm not going to build my own AWS cdk.

Do something better -- self host!

Everyone decloud and only use the standard libraries compilers provide. What a wonderful world! Everyone is forced to do some system programming. Going to be pain in the beginning but then whoever really passionate about programming (not shipping products but programming) is going to be happy.

OK just joke :/ Although I do secretly wish to wake up one morning and find out we have to do things like in the early 90s.

Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps

#119
post #74

It's a bit wild that the sum total money spent on salaries for engineers handling potential problems stemming from this or defending against the possibility in the future could probably have covered paying the maintainer a living wage many times over.

Tragedy of the commons, shortsightedness and misaligned individual incentives.

Individual contributors in large companies, especially, would want their companies to fund FOSS projects they use. But approval processes are generally extremely complicated and there's nothing to gain internally by doing it. And we're talking about money that these corporations spend each millisecond. They barely need approvals for many other activities costing 10x, 100x in other domains.

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