Node packaging is fucked. Node packaging remains fucked. And we have fucked it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the makers of all unmaintainable spaghetti? What was webscale and most utilitarian of all that the computers have yet executed has ground to a halt under our keyboards: who will wipe this blood off us?
Node packaging is fucked. Node packaging remains fucked.
I am sorry, but as a noobie user of npm I don’t understand. It works pretty well for me if you use it normally for what it is supposed for.
If used in larger systems it can be a pain to maintain code bases as you could install an innocuous package but that package may depend on 100 other packages which in turn could have other dependencies and it cascades.
This can introduce bugs into your code which can be a pain to resolve.
Isn’t this a problem with every package/library system? Is there really a solution to this that doesn’t limit packages with how they handle their dependencies?
This may also be about trust. npm probably could limit a number of dependencies that a single package can have with an arbitrary limit, but they don’t do that, because they trust the developers they won’t misuse their options. Well…
I’m curious if you mean this one issue talked about in the article is the only reason why node packaging is “fucked” or do you have any citations you can provide that point out other issues with it?
I feel this is just a natural progression of how the developers wanted it to function and this is an opportunity to resolve it.
Better that this is done by mistake and resolved than it being used in a malicious attack.
It’s the cascading nature of the dependencies. You could install a single package that might directly or indirectly depend on 100’s of other packages, which can introduce bugs into existing code bases which can be difficult to fix as you have no control over another library or dependency.
We’ve since realized there is an issue with “star” versions - a.k.a depending on any/all versions of another package ( “package-xyz”: “*” ) - any version of that package is now unable to unpublish.
kinda reminds me of the ‘reply all’ snafu that microsoft caused themselves with early exchange server, the complete system failures, and the subsequent attempts at controlling that feature
This is hilarious, but now I’m wondering, what would a saner package manger look like?
- Like Python, have a large and featureful standard library such that > 80% of NPM packages are redundant. Other languages allow you to make very large projects with only a few tens of dependencies. JavaScript requires THOUSANDS.
- With this in place, stop with the recursive dependencies, immediately and forever. Every other package manager under the sun installs the dependencies next to each other.
I’d say pip is saner, though not by much as its support for private registries is very bad and seems designed to facilitate supply-chain attacks. I’ve heard a lot of good things about cargo but haven’t used it enough myself to have a strong opinion.
The lack of a standard library is really the worst offender. Most of a given node_modules directory is filled with middleware to handle JS’s lack of everything.
Is that still a valid argument in 2024? The standard library has grown since the leftpad scandal. JS does have standard leftpad now.
It’s a genuine question, I no longer write Javascript for a living.
Pip is definitely not saner. The way installs are centralized has bitten me in the ass multiple times, when I wanted to have two different versions of Conan installed on a single machine.
And I know there are workarounds like virtualenvs, but they’re complex hacks. Stockholm syndrome yadda yadda yadda.
If it was sane, downloads would be centralized (no point in downloading the same package over and over again) but installs would be project-local (symlinks? There are multiple ways to do this, cf Conan)
Sure, NPM is wasteful with storage space but I’ll take inefficient over brittle any day.
It’s saner, not perfect. With virtualenvs it does basically what you describe except that it re-downloads everything for every virtualenv, but that does not typically matter much since it’s not downloading a billion dependencies.
With NPM there’s no choice but to have hundreds of duplicates installed for every project, that’s not just inefficient but it is a security, maintainability, and auditability nightmare.
The standard library thing is a really valid point, but how do you avoid recursive dependencies? Do you just not allow library packages to depend on anything?
pipis saner
Is it? It is very bare bones in my experience, I could never bring myself to use it until they make it a more fully fledged tool, such as the cargo you mentioned, yes
npm downloads every dependency recursively. If a depends on d (= 1.2.3) and b depends on d (= 1.2.4), then both versions of d get downloaded into a and b’s respective node_modules.
All other package managers I’m aware of resolve dependencies into a flat list then download, and you can only have one version of the same package on your system.
Other package managers, like nuget, throw errors if all dependencies on a package cannot be met by a single version.
This is probably the result of it copying all libraries in the same output directory and that .net cannot load 2 different versions of the same library so more an application restriction.
The downside of this is that packages often can’t use newer features if they want to not block the users of that library and that utility libraries have to have his backwards compatibility so applications can use the latest version while dependent libraries target an older version. Often applications keep using older versions with known security issues.
IDK any full-time JS or Node developers but they seem like they’re lazy and all have ADD. Packages developed for years still on version 0.x, packages depending on deprecated packages that were replaced by core functionality, packages still using CommonJS format (which I actually like better unfortunately), and popular packages without an update for 3 years. It feels like the entire ecosystem is for hobbyists only and businesses are like, “Cute language, but not for us.”
Ryan Dhal, the creator of node, litterally saw the npm problem(s) before incidents like this happened, and created Deno to fix his mistakes. And fix them he did! The Deno import system is incredible. Its basically the only reason I use deno. You can just import URLs directly, the deno vendors (aka caches) them. Deno has an equivlent to npm.org (Deno.land/x) but anyone can import straight from github, or make their npm.org equivlent, or import from their own private server. So if a company wants reliability, they can mirror deno.land while also avoiding unpublishing.
This situation is due to npm’s policy shift following the infamous “left-pad” incident in 2016, where a popular package left-pad was removed, grinding development to a halt across much of the developer world. In response, npm tightened its rules around unpublishing, specifically preventing the unpublishing of any package that is used by another package.
This already seems like a pretty strange approach, and takes away agency from package maintainers. What if you accidentally published something you want to remove…? It kind of turns npm into a very centralized system.
If they don’t want to allow hard-removals because of this, why not let people unpublish packages into a soft/hidden state instead? Maybe mark them with the current dependencies, but don’t allow new ones - or something
I prefer the approach of Azure DevOps more. When you publish any nuget, or npm into their system, the entire package dependency tree is pulled in and backed up there. So you don’t rely on NPM anymore to keep your referenced packages safe
I feel like you could also give the maintainers the power to “re-publish” using a different verified maintainer so that if such a thing does happen, it can be reversed without input from the maintainer that originally pulled it. I don’t know enough about the system to really know if this is a good idea tho.
I see this as a delightful and very apropos revenge against how they treated Azer Koçulu for his use of kik as a package name, and how they tore it out of his hands simply because he wasn’t some million-dollar corp with an army of vampire lawyers.
Any truly fair system would have a “you used it legitimately first, you can have it” system.
You want to centralize control, and kick small devs in the teeth? Enjoy the fallout, f**kers.
