[Jare]

In theory, deleted packages can't be taken over, their name remains reserved unless the company assigns it manually via some administrative process. That is, unless there are bugs which can actually delete packages, which seems to be the case here.

Namespaced packages/repos have their own problems (figuring out which is the "good" one after some time and a few forks happen)

[krapp]

>Namespaced packages/repos have their own problems (figuring out which is the "good" one after some time and a few forks happen)

Most if not all of these packages are hosted somewhere like Github. It's not hard to tell which repo has the most stars, fewest issues or most recent commit, that work's already done for you.

But, we're talking about Node packages here - many of which seem to be trivial, or single line functions. How many forks of left-pad could one expect to find?

[Jare]

> How many forks of left-pad could one expect to find?

Javascript github repos: 70 of left-pad and 29 of leftpad. Some are jokes, but still...

If you try the C++ package manager conan.io you will likely run into similar troubles. See for example https://github.com/lasote/conan-zlib/issues/23

[krapp]

Fair enough... that's a lot more than I would have expected. But I still think on balance there are more benefits to using namespaces than drawbacks. Without namespaces, the same problems of quality control exist, but the decisions are being hidden from you or made on your behalf by a central authority, or you're just stuck with whomever got to the name first.