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Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

> NPM is by no means the worst offender here

Ok, I can agree it is a boring comment, but who is worse?

NPM gets targeted both because it is popular and because there is a wider attack surface (lots of little packages promoted by a huge variety of users) I have a high schooler who published work a couple weeks ago. This is good, but it comes with downsides. Maybe a couple more speed bumps or classifiers would be helpful. Maybe a consolidation of under maintained projects and deprecation is in order.

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Arguably crates.io is worse. NPM has cooldowns and has for a while, it has had Trusted Publishing for longer, it has human-approved releases that separate CI/CD from actual publishing. Ruby is probably worse in every way.

RubyGems actually adopted Trusted Publishing before both npm and crates.io. To my recollection, they were second after PyPI.

(I have no opinion about the overall security posture of these indices.)

No build script control though.

Yep. That remains the norm with Python source distributions as well. It’s a hard thing to overcome when it’s baked deeply into packaging assumptions.

Yeah, my point is just that other package managers aren't in a great spot. NPM even lets you separate out "publish" and "release" now where you can publish to the registry but you have to separately "ack" that to release. That's kinda a huge win if people use it.

I just think the framing that npm is so bad is really flatly invalid.

> the framing that npm is so bad is really flatly invalid.

Is it really though if we're getting thousands of compromised packages regularly?

You can do all the right things and still be legit problematic.

Yes, it has nothing to do with the design of npm (relative to similar languages/ repositories) and everything to do with the popularity.

I don’t think npm itself is measurably bad in ways that are useful to index on. Like others, I think that JS as an ecosystem has a culture that encourages both dependency sprawl and living at the edge, both of which contribute to the end problem of OSS malware.

(Rust has a similar culture, to be clear. I don’t think it’s a death knell.)

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