Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Which NPM package has the largest version number?

adamhl.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#41

Post by dotancohen »

bapak wrote: post #30
franky47 wrote: post #18

Anthony Fu’s epoch versioning scheme (to differentiate breaking change majors from "marketing" majors) could yield easy winners here, at least on the raw version number alone (not the number of sequential versions released): https://antfu.me/posts/epoch-semver

> People often assume that a zero-major version indicates that the software is not ready for production I wonder why. Conventions that are being broken, maybe.

I agree with that sentiment.

If the guy writing and maintaining the software is stating "this software is not stable yet" then who am I to disagree?

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#42

Post by krapp »

dotancohen wrote: post #40
bapak wrote: post #31

> there are over 2800 legacy mixed-case packages, many of which have the same spelling as other existing lowercase packages This is insane

> This is insane Not for the JavaScript world. I hate to deride the entire community, but many of the collective community decisions are smells. I think that the low barrier to entry means that the community has many inexperienced influential people.

A lot of these decisions were made after Javascript went "enterprise" to make it seem more like a "serious" programming language to SV entrepreneurs by a small number of corporations, not necessarily the community.

The bar for entry was always low with javascript, but it also used to be a lot more sane when it was a publicly-driven language.

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#43

Post by rs186 »

EdSchouten wrote: post #26

So 19494 is the largest? That's far lower than I expected. There's nobody out there that has put a date in a version number (e.g., 20250915)?

Well, we are looking at npm packages, where every package is supposed to follow semantic versioning. The fact that we don't have date as version number means everyone is a good citizen.

https://docs.npmjs.com/about-semantic-versioning

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#44

Post by remedan »

bapak wrote: post #30
franky47 wrote: post #18

Anthony Fu’s epoch versioning scheme (to differentiate breaking change majors from "marketing" majors) could yield easy winners here, at least on the raw version number alone (not the number of sequential versions released): https://antfu.me/posts/epoch-semver

> People often assume that a zero-major version indicates that the software is not ready for production I wonder why. Conventions that are being broken, maybe.

I don't know if this is the origin, but the semver spec says 0.x.y is unstable. Sure, not everybody uses semver, but it is popular enough for people to make incorrect assumptions.

https://semver.org/#spec-item-4

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#45

Post by abxyz »

breakingcups wrote: post #32
stabbles wrote: post #20

For Python (or PyPI) this is easier, since their data is available on Google BigQuery [1], so you can just run SELECT * FROM `bigquery-public-data.pypi.distribution_metadata` ORDER BY length(version) DESC LIMIT 10 The winner is: https://pypi.org/project/elvisgogo/#history The package with most versions still listed on PyPI is spanishconjugator [2], which consistently published ~240 releases per month between 2020 and…

Tangential, but I've only heard about BigQuery from people being surprised with gargantuan bills for running one query on a public dataset. Is there a "safe" way to use it with a cost limit, for example?

Yes you can set price caps. The cost of a query is understandable ahead of time with the default pricing model ($6 per TB of data processed in a query). People usually get caught out by running expensive queries recursively. BigQuery is very cost effective and can be used safely.

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#46

Post by CITIZENDOT »

jve wrote: post #14
aragonite wrote: post #7

Incidentally I once ran into a mature package that had lived in the 0.0.x lane forever and treated every release as a patch, racking up a huge version number, and I had to remind the maintainer that users depending with caret ranges won't get those updates automatically. (In semver caret ranges never change the leftmost non-zero digit; in 0.0.x that digit is the patch version, so ^0.0.123 is just a hard pin to 0.0.12…

Maybe that is intentional? Which package is it?

threejs ?

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#47

Post by 1gn15 »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #9

> Time to fetch version data for each one of those packages: ~12 hours (yikes) The author could improve the batching in fetchAllPackageData by not waiting for all 50 ( BATCH_SIZE ) promises to resolve at once. I just published a package for proper promise batching last week: https://www.npmjs.com/package/promises-batched

Worried about being rate limited or DoSing the server.

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#48

Post by Savageman »

dotancohen wrote: post #39
sundarurfriend wrote: post #33

The Julia General registry is locally stored as a tar.gz and has version info for all registered packages, so I tried this out for Julia packages. The top 5 are: DiffEqBase 6.189.1 LoopVectorization 0.12.172 Reactant 0.2.161 Mooncake 0.4.159 Distributions 0.25.120 So, no crazy numbers or random unknown packages, all are major packages that have just had a lot of work and history to them. Out of the top 10, pretty muc…

You might want to try a different storing strategy. 0.25 is above 0.4. These are, I believe, what are called in Unix flags "human numbers".

I understood the list is ordered by biggest number, aka 189 > 172 > 161 > 159 > 120

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#49

Post by whilenot-dev »

1gn15 wrote: post #47
whilenot-dev wrote: post #9

> Time to fetch version data for each one of those packages: ~12 hours (yikes) The author could improve the batching in fetchAllPackageData by not waiting for all 50 ( BATCH_SIZE ) promises to resolve at once. I just published a package for proper promise batching last week: https://www.npmjs.com/package/promises-batched

Worried about being rate limited or DoSing the server.

Sure, the need for backpressure occurs anyway, regardless of batching optimization.

Couldn't find any specific rate limit numbers besides the one mentioned here[0] from 2019:

> Up to five million requests to the registry per month are considered acceptable at this time

[0]: https://blog.npmjs.org/post/187698412060/acceptible-use.html

Re: Which NPM package has the largest version number?

#50

Post by dijksterhuis »

Rygian wrote: post #38
stabbles wrote: post #20

For Python (or PyPI) this is easier, since their data is available on Google BigQuery [1], so you can just run SELECT * FROM `bigquery-public-data.pypi.distribution_metadata` ORDER BY length(version) DESC LIMIT 10 The winner is: https://pypi.org/project/elvisgogo/#history The package with most versions still listed on PyPI is spanishconjugator [2], which consistently published ~240 releases per month between 2020 and…

Regarding spanishconjugator, commit ec4cb98 has description "Remove automatic bumping of version". Prior to that commit, a cronjob would run the 'bumpVersion.yml' workflow four times a day, which in turn executes the bump2version python module to increase the patch level. [0] Edit: discussed here: https://github.com/Benedict-Carling/spanish-conjugator/issue... [0] https://github.com/Benedict-Carling/spanish-conjugato…

i love the package owner’s response in that issue xD
Post reply on HN