[koolhaas]

I would say, it doesn’t really fix npm. It has its own centralized npm repo, called deno land, and it’s own package.json, called deps.ts.

Because it can accept any URL as a dep in the source files, you can in theory do some cuter, weirder things with it. But security wise I’d argue arbitrary URLs, for critical, high traffic deps, are harder to fix when bad things happen, without centralized control.

[iainmerrick]

This something I really don’t understand about Deno. I feel like I must be missing something.

How do I pin the versions of my dependencies? i.e. where is the package lock file?

If the idea is that every source file will specify the version it wants of every dependency, that seems unmanageable. Or if every source file just imports the latest version of its deps, how do I get reproducible builds?

I want a lockfile with an explicit manual step to update dependencies. “npm ci” seems to work well. I don’t see how Deno improves on it, quite the reverse.

Edit to add: hmm, there are some docs here that look relevant: https://deno.land/manual/linking_to_external_code/integrity_... But this reads as “if you really want package integrity, here are some awkward commands you can run to do it”. I strongly feel this should be the default behaviour that the tools should steer you towards. And in the examples on this page, the source code does link to specific library versions; I have a hard time accepting that that’s a good idea, except possibly for major versions.

[wperron]

yeah, it's a bit awkward and you have to dig through the docs to find it. We're thinking about making it the default behavior.

[iainmerrick]

Please do! I think that would be a big win.

The package integrity and import maps sections of the docs look like they do everything that’s needed, they just look fiddly to use correctly.

Maybe it just wants something as simple as an optional .denorc at the root of your project to set the default flags?

[mekkkkkk]

If you want to use locked version deps from VCS you point to a specific tag, not a branch IIRC.

[wperron]

deno.land/x is _not_ a central registry. It's something we maintain as a convenience to the community, but we actually go to great lengths to make sure it doesn't receive preferential treatment from the CLI. Importing modules from nest.land, skypack.dev, esm.sh or jspm.io is common in the ecosystem and is something we're looking to keep encouraging.

It's also pretty easy to vendor in your dependencies so that they don't move between the time you commit and the time your server starts. We also support lock files so you don't _have_ to vendor your deps too. Versioning is up to the server you import from, but typically you'd put version in the URL somewhere (ideally a pinned version).

Security-wise, There are other articles out there that detail this but it's not fundamentally less secure than importing from npm as you're still pulling a JavaScript file from the internet in both cases. The cool thing here with URLs is that it's pretty easy to audit and create an allowlist of known-good and trusted servers to import from in your org.

As for vulnerability reporting & patching; I think we're still lacking a good vulnerability database, that much is true, but fixing deeply integrated deps that have vulnerabilities is pretty easy using import maps really.

[dmitriid]

> It's also pretty easy to vendor in your dependencies

It's not the first time I see this claim in this discussion. Describe "easy".

In the case of the much-hated npm, or yarn, it's as easy as:

   npm/yarn install package

This will pull both the package and all its dependencies. It will create a lock file and will essentially lock the version. There are additional ways to specify the exact versions, and version ranges for packages and dependencies.

Additionally, it's quite trivial to make npm/yarn to pull not from npm, but from, say, a private package registry that only has vetted and audited packages.

So. Given that "it's easy to vendor in your dependencies", how will all this look in Deno?

We already know that even such a simple thing as lockfiles is, multiple manual steps with awkward parameters to the cli that people shouldn't forget [1]. This is... not easy.

[1] https://deno.land/manual/linking_to_external_code/integrity_...

[koolhaas]

Thanks for the response. And thank you for clarifying that there is a larger ecosystem of package repositories, and that Deno does not give preferential treatment to any. In theory npm can do the same, but of course there is official support and community gravitational pull around a single service.

I agree there is nothing fundamentally less secure in general, but what you don’t get is being able to standardize around security for dev account protection, policies around immutability, DNS stuff, and some other centralized security measures. Neither are bullet proof, but there are some things you can’t protect against with random URLs.

I’d argue URLs are fine until you get massive use of a single package and it weaves itself into a complex dependency tree across multiple other critical projects. Then you worry about the what if’s.

[wperron]

> I’d argue URLs are fine until you get massive use of a single package and it weaves itself into a complex dependency tree across multiple other critical projects. Then you worry about the what if’s.

This is already an issue with npm. My personal take on this is that at that point that dependency should be vendored as much as possible but obviously it's hard to fight the existing inertia on this one. Also worth noting that the [std lib][1] is an attempt at a pragmatic solution to the problem where these foundational packages that are seemingly used by every framework out there essentially converges to the standard lib. I agree it's not perfect at the moment but it's a start.

[1]: https://deno.land/std