Just compare this to publication to Maven Central - you’ll never publish there by accident exactly because there are significant barriers. Public NPM repo should not be that easily accessible for upload.
Later, once you have most needs filled by packages, and a good number of enterprise users, more control is beneficial. Companies appreciate it, and single users are willing to jump through an extra hoop or two much of the time because the rest of the ecosystem is so useful that it's not worth switching languages.
I think it's unlikely that a system will move from one style to another without an event causing them to reevaluate their prior choices. More likely, multiple events. This has already happened with NPM for other choices they made in the past, such as letting package namespaces be claimed by new people after someone gives it up, and whether releases are immutable, IIRC.
Why not install `com.facebook.react’? Reverse domain notation is remarkably elegant given our internet. You are not typing ‘npm i com.facebook.react’ so often that it’s a pain. You probably use ‘create-react-app’ which is even worse.
Instead, every language creates a new cash grab for common names. And made it worse. New namespaces, new squatting. I can publish ‘react-racket’ and do whatever I want behind the scenes with it.
Case in point: do you add coffeescript or coffee-script.
Why optimise for keystrokes in your term instead of stability for your client? Jesus fuck.
A whole quarter of a century, or perhaps half of the entire software industries lifetime, of exciting known security errors to look forward to!
BRB, off to hide all my bitcoin under my mattress...
That would be a bad idea, and it's not just brevity.
- If com.facebook.hr has previously been published, would it mean that facebook can never have a division named HR?
- Once a company goes belly up, the domain often ends up with squatters/spammers. Domains with published packages will sell for a lot more in the underground market - for pure exploitation of rights to publish a newer version.
- In the absence of validation, nothing stops anyone from publishing com.google.exploitlib. And domain validation is friction.
- Most publishers on npm may not have a domain.
And finally like someone mentioned below, npm already supports scoped packages. https://docs.npmjs.com/about-scopes
This is such a solvable problem.
Doesn't package.json have an is private repo flag? Why not just respect that?
Why does everyone everyone in this thread think a pop up is the solution?
Pop ups are a code smell. They mean your application does not correctly match user intent with the action so badly you had to specifically get your user to tell you what they meant to do. Did you mean to do that? Always, yes. Otherwise, undo.
The only place did you mean makes sense is in Google search results.
Why is public and private publish anywhere near each other? Why are they even on the same page?
Stop drawing boundaries around nouns.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a pop up popup per say, but extra validation around dangerous actions is user friendly.
And of course there can always be an override for the extra validation in case it potentially screws up some people's workflows, but I'd make a user explicitly set the override, like the 'NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost' option in ssh for example.
If the user hacks around that, it's their own fault.
I don't think a popup solving a problem means it is solving the right problem in the right way.
npm does reflect that flag. If you set private in package.json, npm won't publish it publicly. From docs:
> private
> If you set "private": true in your package.json, then npm will refuse to publish it.
> This is a way to prevent accidental publication of private repositories. If you would like to ensure that a given package is only ever published to a specific registry (for example, an internal registry), then use the publishConfig dictionary described below to override the registry config param at publish-time.
Make it so you have to explicitly go in and mark your package.json as public before npm will publish it, and have the default be private?
I don't have _too_ much sympathy for the bank here - it's in npm's best interest to make it easy to publish leftpad.js easily <snarky smirk> - and that probably should be their default stance.
The bank should be responsible for ensuring their "banking grade security" includes not accidentally publishing their source code to public repos. (How much would you bet against there being instances exactly like this where the publication vector was GitHub instead of npm? How much would you bet against this exact code being on a public git repo somewhere as well? How many public code hosting services should be expected to change their business models because some bank gets uptight after they've fucked up?)
Some bank developer (or more likely, some underpaid contractor) wants to share something between projects and doesn't want the hassle of proper channels, or just doesn't care enough and thinks "I'll publish this, who will ever find it?".
Years later someone stumbles upon it, maybe they don't even know who did it, "NPM why do you have our code?!?!?!?!"
This is the most likely scenario once you consider this was a bank. In which case there's nothing NPM could do. No warning would have changed their intent, they knew what they were signing up for.
That's what I was getting at above. It definitely was in NPM's best interest to do so. Depending on your definition of "easily", is it still in their interest to have it quite that easy? Perhaps a different default is in order now, as you suggest. Or perhaps it should even require a confirmation dialog on the terminal for the first public push? People will still use NPM at this point. Not having enough packages or a package for a specific functionality is hardly a problem for them any more.
Then libraries could simply add an npm script for publishing.
npm publish
To publish a package to
npm, you must enter:
npm publish npm <package-name>
To publish a package to
another registry, you
must enter:
npm publish <url> <package-name>
At the end of the day, there's only so much you can do. Really, a hammer shouldn't have a prompt on it confirming each hit. If it does, users will just instinctively press it and then a few months down the road they'll hit their thumb.
Ever tried installing a local package via a file path? NPM just symlinks it into node_modules, causing issues because you suddenly have duplicated dependencies. Yarn does the same, btw.
I have given up any hope regarding npm/yarn acting sensible long ago.
https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/5310
oops
Not a rule. Do you really want undoable actions like "Delete" to just delete in a touch operated interface?
That said, I fully support a terminal level confirmation the first time something is pushed publicly in any package manager. It is absolutely the correct thing to do to add safeties to a process that is irreversible and can have negative consequences. Often enough, making anything public online is irreversible, and making something public that wasn't ever supposed to be can have negative consequences in many respects.
But what I was really thinking of when I was typing my original comment was moving to a system where someone actually approves new package publishing accounts and or some subset of package namespace requests. Systems that start without any sort of moderating or approval process seem to eventually settle on one. The reasons for this are numerous, from security to just keeping people from overwhelming the more common or sought after names and general sanity checks (does a system really need to allow separate packages for a term where one is singular and one is plural? Who does that help?).