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Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

Real registries do[1], npm is just amateur-hour which is why its usage is typically forbidden in enterprise contexts.

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-manual/de...

In all fairness—npm belongs to GitHub, which belongs to Microsoft. Amateur-hour is both not a valid excuse anymore, and also a boring explanation. GitHub is going to great lengths to enable SLSA attestations for secure tool chains; there must be systemic issues in the JS ecosystem that make an implementation of proper attestations infeasible right now, everything else wouldn't really make sense.

So if we're discussing anything here, why not what this reason is, instead of everyone praising their favourite package registry?

The NPM team has repeatedly commented that it's "too hard", effectively, and would discourage new developers from publishing packages. See:

https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/4016#issuecomment-76316744

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645969

https://github.com/npm/cli/commit/5a3b345d6d5d175ea9ec967364...

I don't think I'd trust a package from a new developer like that, so this helps filter out people that don't know how to properly maintain a package. If they really want to make onboarding easier, saying "after e.g. 1000 monthly downloads, you'll need to sign your artifacts" is also a viable solution in my opinion.

The npm team is, frankly, a bunch of idiots for saying that. It has been obvious for TEN YEARS that the bar for publishing npm packages is far too low. That’s what made npm what it is, but it’s no longer needed. They should put on their big boy pants.

> discourage new developers from publishing packages

Good.

It's not like these packages are super sophisticated million LOCs masterpieces. ansi-regex is literally just this:

    export default function ansiRegex({onlyFirst = false} = {}) {
 // Valid string terminator sequences are BEL, ESC\, and 0x9c
 const ST = '(?:\\u0007|\\u001B\\u005C|\\u009C)';

 // OSC sequences only: ESC ] ... ST (non-greedy until the first ST)
 const osc = `(?:\\u001B\\][\\s\\S]*?${ST})`;

 // CSI and related: ESC/C1, optional intermediates, optional params (supports ; and :) then final byte
 const csi = '[\\u001B\\u009B][[\\]()#;?]*(?:\\d{1,4}(?:[;:]\\d{0,4})*)?[\\dA-PR-TZcf-nq-uy=><~]';

 const pattern = `${osc}|${csi}`;

 return new RegExp(pattern, onlyFirst ? undefined : 'g');
}

   ... | wc -c
   592

592 bytes of code including comments and whitespace versus which amount of overhead in package description, tarball caches, etc...?

No kidding. New developers need to learn the important skill of doing something correctly, not just “ship fast; break things”

Yeah Microsoft would have bought or taken over npm just to train on all the data against peoples wills, not to actually improve or put any effort into making it better

It sure hasn’t been forbidden in any enterprise I’ve been in! And they, in my experience, have it even worse because they never bother to update dependencies. Every install has lots of npm warnings.

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