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0 pointsIggleSniggle9mo ago0 comments

The 3rd option is the one Azer describes in the post:

He wants to remove his stuff, but isn't sure what the right way to do it is, so he asks npm. npm provides him with a set of scripts to run to remove his stuff, and he, presuming that it's "ok" if npm told him to go ahead and run them, runs them. The impact isn't especially important to him, But since npm just gave him a set of scripts with an implicit "oh okay you want to remove your stuff, here I wrote you a script you can run to get it done," makes it more of an npm choice to handle it in this manner. npm asked him to handle it this way, so he did.

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k__9mo ago

What would the alternative have looked like?

If NPM would have prevented the depublishing, he would have made a scene and in the worst case, they would have looked bad.

How they actually handled it, the library author got full freedom but also full responsibility

msla9mo ago

At a certain point, no, you can't unpublish because the world only has one arrow of time. Imagine if Torvalds decides to unpublish his code in the Linux kernel. It's easy to understand how that would work: His code would remain out there for all time because doing anything else would be a massive disruption and cause people actual problems. People don't just give others a way to hurt them like that if they know what they're doing, even if they got a lot of value from them in the past.

Lesson: Vendor your dependencies, I guess. Although a lot of the ire around left-pad was programmers using a library for something so trivial, but that's a different conversation.

bartread9mo ago

> Although a lot of the ire around left-pad was programmers using a library for something so trivial, but that's a different conversation.

Very true.

Although, from 2012 onwards, up to around the time of the leftpad incident, the trend - and the pressure - was to minimise the amount of work your code was doing and to publish tiny packages that only did one thing or solved one problem, deferring to other tiny packages for anything non-core. I remember colleagues more embedded in the JS world than I was passionately arguing for this in 2012/13.

And it did make some sense: bandwidth matters, particularly on mobile devices (which became a key source of traffic during that period) so why pull in some gigantic do everything library when you only need a handful of functions[0]? Sure, minifying and pruning help but, due to JS's nature, pruning can only get you so far.

But, yes, I think leftpad was something of a teaching moment on the downsides of this approach.

[0] Of course, if you then stick 6 different tracking scripts in all your pages, it's super-easy to undo all the good you've done by minimising your bundle size, but that's a different conversation.

lmm9mo ago

> If NPM would have prevented the depublishing, he would have made a scene and in the worst case, they would have looked bad.

I mean he says he asked them to remove all his packages, expecting them to do so gradually, following whatever mitigation strategy they felt appropriate (e.g. some kind of warning and fadeout process), and instead they gave him a script to do it immediately so he did that.

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eviks9mo ago

> and in the worst case, they would have looked bad.

As opposed to looking much worse? Easy decision.

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