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Comment by nv-vn | Hacker News Reader

Worse yet, a backdoor or legitimate bug in any of these module could leave huge exploits in the entire Node.js ecosystem.

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A backdoor or legitimate bug in any line of custom code could leave huge exploits in your system. A widely-used published module is likely to be much more reliable, at least on average.

Except when you are using a library like boost or pandas you know the people behind it know what they are doing. When you are importing from a thousand different package authors any one of those people could be incompetent and/or malicious and screw up your entire code base.

Worse yet, the OS is compromised. This is why I hand roll all my encryption libraries. /s

Riiiight. Because cryptography is identical to an 12-line string padding function.

I think that was smokeyj's point... the left-pad module is not going to have a "backdoor". nv-vn was creating a bit of a straw man, as no example or particular scenario in this article involved crypto.

No, I disagree with smokeyj drawing a false parallel to encryption to try to justify why you should use an external dependency for 12 lines of code -- because "you should never roll your own crypto" is not applicable here.

I just used crypto as a random example. I could have said "this is why I write my own input sanitation library" or "HTTP" library.

My point is OSS is a collaborative effort by often times anonymous contributors. Therefore there will always be a risk of bugs or back doors - regardless of the distribution mechanism.

In my opinion any criticism against micro packages is equally valid against large packages. There's no guarantee that a pull request would receive any more scrutiny than a external dependency. I mean look at heart bleed. Surely this doesn't mean that OSS is broken, but rather stricter security protocols should be in place. My 2 cents.

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