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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

The elephant in the room here is NPM, and I think the obvious problem there is the culture. I have a tiny app I've been playing with using create-react-app. There are over 800 directories in node_modules. That absolutely dwarfs the number of any other language I've used. Even in a medium sized rails app, you likely have some awareness of what every dependency is. It's just impossible with npm.

One thought I've had to "reboot" the npm culture is to somehow curate packages that are proven to have minimal and safe dependencies, and projects can shift to using those. I imagine there has to be some sort of manual review to make that happen.

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It's part of the culture of frontend programming.

In the past I've needed to display a timestamp as something like "n weeks ago" (in a mac app). My first instinct was to write a quick function to do the transform. Then I can tweak it and extend it later to fit my app's needs.

However when I asked the web app team at my company to see their code so I could use the same initial set of intervals, it turns out they use a library to do it. The first instinct of a frontend dev seems to be - even for very tiny, single function solutions - download a library.

To be fair, there are problems that look easy at the first sight, but turn out surprisingly difficult -- and working with time is almost always one of those problems.

npm may be an elephant, but why is it in a room talking about go.mod?

Why not drag APT and the Debian unstable repository in as well? i think install-debian-os also has around 800 dependencies. Debian unstable is vulnerable to supply chain attacks by package maintainers, and Debian stable suffers from lack of volunteers backporting and verifying security patches. Yet, if their numbers increase, the small chance increases a cabal of them attacks the supply chain by pushing and vouching for a fake patch that introduces malicious code ...

The elephant in the room is not some package manager unrelated to the topic. The elephant is trust.

GO argues to mitigate attacks by verifying and locking all dependencies yourself. Which, does not scale.

Debian argues with a proof of work, carefully curating what they publish, and who can publish to fast tracks like the security repo. In theory these people could go insane or be hacked in the same way node module devs go insane or get hacked. But curated publishing mitigates some of the risk.

As far as i know there is only one "third party" GO module repository (actually its generic, supporting both go.mod, npm, and many more) that has a multi-stage system of curation. It promises to integrate lots of tools, global cooperation, configurable policies, an AI and a team of specialists to help with curation. It is also proprietary, stupidly expensive and may not fully deliver on those promises.

The creator of NodeJS talks about how one of the things he regrets is hard-coupling Node to the NPM registry[1]. I imagine this makes it hard to have curated or trusted third-party registries (although note that it is possible to configure private or third-party registries in Node). This is also one of the problems the creator tries to solve in his new runtime, Deno.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA

I think the NPM organization is completely aware just how dangerous this all is, and is eager to hide it. For example, if you look up an NPM package, it'll list its direct dependencies. But, there's no acknowledgement whatsoever of all the stuff that comes along for the ride.

I'd love to have a well-supported ranking of NPM packages in terms of their dependencies (and their dependencies' dependencies, etc). Knowing the breadth of immediate dependencies, PLUS the depth of the total dependency tree, would give you some inkling of just how much you're taking for granted when you start using a package.

I agree that it would be nice for NPM to show the total footprint of a module, especially if that provides some social incentive to reduce the dependency count.

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