Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I don't think unpublish should even exist and it just creates all these scenarios full of subjective decisions that will help some and harm others.

If 1.0.0 was published and it has a serious bug, publish a new package with the bug fix. Let 1.0.0 alone forever.

View on HN

If unpublish shouldn't exist, then neither should there be the ability to rename packages.

Yes, you would need to publish a new version of the package with a different name. But the history of what happened (and consequently anyone depending on the old name) would be preserved.

They could adopt Github's model, which seems to work well: when you rename something, the old name becomes an irrevocable redirect to the new name (at least, I think it's irrevocable, I haven't tested it), so all existing uses of the old name still work transparently.

I have broken GitHub links, I assure you they're not irrevocable. I transferred my project laughinghan/mathquill to its own organization, so the repo became mathquill/mathquill, and then forked it, unwittingly breaking all github.com/laughinghan/mathquill/* URLs: not commits obviously, but Issues, PRs, Commit Comments...my commit messages occasionally link to discussions in commit comments, all of which were broken. :(

Prohibiting unpublish wouldn't prevent those scenarios, only the subjective decisions.

The same scenarios would still happen, there just wouldn't be the opportunity to make the subjective call to help more and harm fewer by unpublishing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com