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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

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ryanmarsh

So last week my client discovered there's a gem named bunlder... sigh

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There is a gem called bundle which doesn't do anything but preventing a typosquat

https://rubygems.org/gems/bundle Total downloads 1,800,600

Source (empty) at https://github.com/will/bundle and interesting README.

https://rubygems.org/gems/bundler Total downloads 92,116,090

It's almost the 2%.

I think the authors here missed an opportunity for even more effective squatting like that: cases where the name you import, name you type at the command line, or name you commonly call the package by is different from the name in the repository.

In Python, "pytables" (should be "tables") and "skimage" (should be "scikit-image") come to mind.

Yeah. I think it's becoming a reflex for programmers when they get an import error like:

    Error: Cannot find module 'x'

to quickly type:

    npm install x

My gem has a good downlaod/loc ratio.

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