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Comment by sotojuan | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know why npm moves so slowly?

they have millions of installs and can't break them?

Well, but remember that time they shipped an SSL cert that broke all updated clients? I'm not sure they move slowly because they don't want to break things, because that would have been a pretty easy bug to catch...

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/78165272245/more-help-with-selfsi...

That's not really a good counter example. It's more of a mistake on a release...

It's more of a failure to double check that npm runs when you change the SSL cert you bundled with it.

I think it's a great example of moving a little too quickly, honestly. Especially since it bricked plenty of npm installs instead of being "just another bug".

Do they necessarily have to break them to move faster? It's a package installer. Yarn is handling locking / shrinkwrapping different but I would argue shrinkwrap needs to be abandoned and re-done anyway so I'm not seeing the risk. It took them, what, two years just to flatten dependencies and move to npm 3? That was actively breaking Windows usage of node!

I love the service they offer. Not a fan of the tools or pace. Npm comes in the node installer so why do they even have to care about improving?

Just my thoughts.

What do you mean by moving slowly? IMO there's not much to add. I'd like to see some speed improvements, but otherwise I'm not sure npm should evolve.

technical debt and not wanting to break people's workflows

Because they focused on hiring SJW profiles that write codes of conducts and readme's all day long instead of actually software engineers that could improve the tool.

Please resist the temptation to glom ideological snark onto unrelated threads. That's not what this site is for and it ruins threads for everyone by being simultaneously distracting and boring.

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