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How One Dev Broke Node and Thousands of Projects In 11 Lines of JavaScript (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes an article written by Chris Williams for The Register: Programmers were left staring at broken builds and failed installations on Tuesday after someone toppled the Jenga tower of JavaScript. A couple of hours ago, Azer Koculu unpublished more than 250 of his modules from NPM, which is a popular package manager used by JavaScript projects to install dependencies. Koculu yanked his source code because, we're told, one of the modules was called Kik and that apparently attracted the attention of lawyers representing the instant-messaging app of the same name. According to Koculu, Kik's briefs told him to take down the module, he refused, so the lawyers went to NPM's admins claiming brand infringement. When NPM took Kik away from the developer, he was furious and unpublished all of his NPM-managed modules. 'This situation made me realize that NPM is someone's private land where corporate is more powerful than the people, and I do open source because Power To The People,' Koculu blogged. Unfortunately, one of those dependencies was left-pad. It pads out the lefthand-side of strings with zeroes or spaces. And thousands of projects including Node and Babel relied on it. With left-pad removed from NPM, these applications and widely used bits of open-source infrastructure were unable to obtain the dependency, and thus fell over.
Dependencies are unavoidable, specially on big projects - you are not expected to reinvent the wheel every time you code.
Now, having a dedicated library dependency for padding strings is a bit of a stretch though...
I've always thought this interconnected pile of stuff, linking across a bunch of domains was lazy, dangerous, and likely to be very brittle.
Sorry, but the interwebs have shown me I can't afford to trust arbitrary code from all over the place, which can change at a moments notice, and which I know nothing about.
If you've created an infrastructure where tons of stuff breaks because some asshole corporation forces some guy to say "fuck you, you can't have my code", you have a terrible mess. What happens if someone adds some malicious code?
What I find really odd is they've over-ruled him and said "no, you can't un-publish your own stuff, we own it". So, what, they've decided his stuff was too important to still be his own? So he got fucked because of corporate assholes only to have his copyright infringed?
Jenga tower indeed, it sounds like the state of the art is a bunch of brittle dependencies controlled by a few places, and subject to causing a shit top of things to happen when someone makes a change.
This reminds me of a company I worked at which had a universal build system ... everything build from scratch every day and wouldn't build if any of its dependencies didn't build. So when some guy broke a components 3 components upstream, nobody could get anything compiled because the system was too stupid to go with the last known good ... and hundreds of developers sat around all day going "but, what do you mean we can't do anything because some guy checked in shit code".
Wow, just wow.
Steaming Heaps of Innovative Technology.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Bullshit.
Dependencies and libraries are fine. If you want to use SSL encryption in your software you should try and re-implement it all, because while SSL libraries have been having security issues in the last few years there's almost zero chance you make something that doesn't have bigger ones. Multiply that by all the domain specific pieces of code you need.
Not having to understand what's actually going on is a feature not a problem.
What is retarded is using a dependency that exists out in the internet somewhere only, so that your code breaks if some random internet service disappears. As long as you have your own copy of the dependency it's fine. Some asshat can't yank them away since you have your own copy that doesn't magically stop working. Obviously you want the source code, or at the very least the source code escrowed somewhere that you obtain if the provider vanishes in the future.
... I hope you're kidding. Don't reinvent the wheel - if someone else has already written the code then there's no reason to re-write it. That's a huge waste of man hours. Instead you should package all dependencies in such a way that they can be retrieved without requiring the other guy to still be offering it. Yes, that means a snapshot of the version you rely of should be in your repository because you also can't guarantee that a given version will be available as long as your own project is.
The AC is too busy to respond, he's currently fixing the 9999999 security flaws in his hand-rolled SSL library.
Thou shalt always mirror your dependencies. Never assume that everything will always be available. That's continuous integration 101.
Second paradigm: mirror even your dependencies source code, if you can.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Missing from your list is that NPM didn't just pull the npm package, they reassigned it to a different user. Think about the security implications of that... it implies anyone can send a few intimidating emails, gain control of a major project, and then substitute with their own code/malware.
Assuming that's how it played out, it might be a good thing the developer threw a hissy fit: the resulting public fallout may or may not prompt NPM (and NuGet, Cargo, Docker, and so forth) to reconsider the trust problem they have created.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction