Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. The changes were intentional malware, designed to break the usage of these two modules. GitHub is under no obligation to assist you in hosting malware. The fact that these changes were intended by the original author has no bearing in this situation.

I don't get how people don't understand this.

Breaking a build in a way that is trivially rolled back is not in the same league as pushing code that harvests email addresses, CCs and mines bitcoin.

I'm disappointed to see this kind of comparison made.

Deliberately breaking people's applications? It's malware.

Appreciate it can be confusing to the layperson, but a build is not quite the same thing as an application.

A build will often reach out, download and install new and potentially breaking software components and it is part of its function to prevent breaking software components from reaching the application where it could cause material harm.

It was a bit of code printing ascii art in a loop, with a preceding comment "don't commit this", and we have bo information about whether it was put into the release on purpose or malicious intent afaik. Is it really malware?