> First, just want to apologize about any difficulties this package has caused.
No rationale. No shame. Just the word “apologize” in a sentence.
Who downloaded it though? Surely as a dev if you download such a package it’s on you?
It’s the world of worse is better and they’re going for the widest possible area of effect. Should we crucify these guys? 100% not. Part of this is on npm’s design and implementation. Part of it is cultural.
But these guys owe the people who were needlessly “inconvenienced” a little more than just the word “apologize”. Not their first born but some rationale which justifies or reveals that they realise it was a bit pointless or stupid.
The wildcard "any version of dependency" preventing unpublish is clearly flawed. The "everything" package folks had no malicious intentions, and nobody would benefit from a long-winded, ashamed apology. If not for NPM's flawed unpublish policy the everything team would've unpublished to resolve the issue.
I just think it would have been good to give the “I was hoping to investigate X, I did not expect Y, I can see now that it was irresponsible to do X.”
I don’t think that’s particularly long winded.
Upon rereading the article I can see that the word “unintended” is actually not Patrick’s but the author of the recap’s word.
Beyond that you seem to be ascribing benign intent. Reading it from the horses mouth [1] it doesn’t seems like they had any intent other than trying to find out if it could be done. In a world of worse is better creating the largest possible area of effect for your experiment seems to be a pretty easy way to amp up the consequences of your actions regardless of the risk.