[lhorie]

I mean, of course I'm going to see this from the lenses of my personal experience (which is that nasty non-reproducibility issues usually would only happen when someone takes over some internal project that had been sitting in a closet for years and the original owner is no longer at the company). Stumbling upon reproducibility issues in 4 year old projects on Github is just not something that happens to me (and I have contributed to projects where, say, Travis CI had been broken in master branch for node 0.10 or whatever) and getting 404s on dependencies is something I can't say I've experienced (unless we're talking about very narrow cases like consuming hijacked versions of packages that were since unpublished) or possibly a different stack that uses git commits for package management (say, C) - and even then, that's not something I've run into (I've messed around w/ C, zig and go projects, if it matters). I don't think it's a matter of me having a narrow perspective, but maybe you could enlighten me.

As I mentioned, my experience involves seeing literally hundreds of packages, many of which were in a context where code rot is more likely to happen (because people typically don't maintain stuff after they leave a company and big tech attrition rate is high, and my company specifically had a huge NIH era). My negative OSS experience has mostly been that package owners abandon projects and don't even respond to github issues in the first place. I wouldn't be in a position to dictate that they should commit node_modules in that case.

Maybe you could give me an example of the types of projects you're talking about? I'm legitimately curious.

[pwdisswordfish0]

> I don't think it's a matter of me having a narrow perspective, but maybe you could enlighten me.

I have to think it is, because the "shape" of your responses here have been advice about things that I/we can do to keep my/our own projects (e.g. mission critical or corporate funded stuff being used in the line of business) rolling, and completely neglected the injured-in-collision-with-other-intoxicated-driver aspect.

Again, I _have_ to think that your lack of contact with these problems has something to do with the particulars of your situation and the narrow patterns that your experience falls within. Of the projects that match the criteria, easily 40% of them are the type I described. (And, please, no pawning it off with a response like "must be a bad configuration on your machine"; these are consistent observations over the bigger part of a decade across many different systems on different machines. It's endemic, not something that can be explained away with the must-be-your-org/must-be-your-installation handwaving.)

> code rot is more likely [...] My negative OSS experience has mostly been that package owners abandon projects and don't even respond to github issues

Sure, but the existence of other problems doesn't negate the existence of this class of problems.

> I wouldn't be in a position to dictate that they should commit node_modules in that case.

Which is why I mentioned that this needs to be baked in to the culture. As it stands, the culture is to discourage simple, sensible solutions and prefers throwing even more overengineered tooling that ends up creating new problems of its own and only halfway solves a fraction of the original ones. (Why? Probably because NodeJS/NPM programmers seem to associate solutions that look simple as being too easy, too amateurish—probably because of how often other communities shit on JS. So NPMers always favor the option that looks like Real Serious Business because it either approaches the problem by heaping more LOC somewhere or—even better—it involves tooling that looks like it must have taken a Grown Up to come up with.)

> Maybe you could give me an example of the types of projects you're talking about? I'm legitimately curious.

Sure, I don't even have to reach since as I said this stuff happens constantly. In this case, at the time of writing the comments in question, it was literally the last project I attempted: check out the Web X-Ray repo <https://github.com/mozilla/goggles.mozilla.org/>.

This is conceptually and architecturally a very simple project, with even simpler engineering requirements, and yet trying to enter the time capsule and resurrect it will bring you to your knees on the zeroeth step of just trying to fetch the requisite packages. That's to say nothing of the (very legitimate) issue involving the expectation that even with a successful completion of `npm install` I'd still generally expect one or more packages for any given project to be broken and in need of being hacked in order to get working again, owing to platform changes. (Several other commenters have brought this up, but, bizarrely, they do so as if it's a retort to the point that I'm making and not as if they're actually helping make my case for me... The messy reasoning involved there is pretty odd.)

[lhorie]

> check out the Web X-Ray repo <https://github.com/mozilla/goggles.mozilla.org/>.

Thanks for the example! Peeking a bit under the hood, it appears to be due to transitive dependencies referencing github urls (and transient ones at that) instead of semver, which admittedly is neither standard nor good practice...

FWIW, simply removing `"grunt-contrib-jshint": "~0.4.3",` from package.json and related jshint-related code from Gruntfile was sufficient to get `npm install` to complete successfully. The debugging just took me a few minutes grepping package-lock.json for the 404 URL in question (https://github.com/ariya/esprima/tarball/master) and tracing that back to a top-level dependency via recursively grepping for dependent packages. I imagine that upgrading relevant dependencies might also do the trick, seeing as jshint no longer depends on esprima[0]. A yarn resolution might also work.

I'm not sure how representative this particular case is to the sort of issues you run into, but I'll tell you that reproducibility issues can get a lot worse in ways that committing deps doesn't help (for example, issues like this one[1] are downright nasty).

But assuming that installation in your link just happens to have a simple fix and that others are not as forgiving, can you clarify how is committing node_modules supposed to help if you're saying you can't even get it to a working state in the first place? Do you own the repo in order to be able to make the change? Or are you mostly just saying that hindsight is 20-20?

[0] https://github.com/jshint/jshint/blob/master/package.json#L4...

[1] https://github.com/node-ffi-napi/node-ffi-napi/issues/97

[pwdisswordfish0]

I don't understand your questions.

My message is that for a very large number of real world scenarios the value proposition of doing things the NPM way does not result in a Pareto improvement, despite conventional wisdom suggesting otherwise.

I also don't understand your motivation for posting an explanation of the grunt-related problem in the Web X-Ray repo. It reminds me of running into a bug and then going out of my way to track down the relevant issue and attach a test case crafted to demonstrate the bug in isolation, only to have people chime in with recommendations about what changes to make to the test case in order to not trigger the bug. (Gee, thanks...)

And to reiterate the message at the end of my last comment: the rationale of trying to point at how bad mainstream development manages to screw up other stuff, too, is without.

[lhorie]

Personally, I see code as a fluid entity. If me spending a few minutes to find a way to unblock something that you claimed to "bring you to your knees on the zeroeth step" is a waste of time, then I guess you and I just have different ideas of what software is. For me, I don't see much value in simply putting up with some barely working codebase out of some sense of historical puritanism; if I'm diving into a codebase, the goal is to improve it, and if jshint or some other subsystem is hopelessly broken for whatever reason, it may well get thrown out in favor of something that actually works.

You may disagree that the way NPM does things works well enough to be widely adopted (and dare I say, liked by many), or that true reproducibility is a harder problem than merely committing files, but by and large, the ecosystem does hum along reasonably well. Personally, I only deal with NPM woes because others find value in it, not because I inherently think it's the best thing since sliced bread (in fact, there are plenty of aspects of NPM that I find absolutely atrocious). My actual personal preference is arguably even less popular than yours: to avoid dependencies wherever possible in the first place, and relentless leveraging of specifications/standards.

[pwdisswordfish0]

> My actual personal preference is arguably even less popular than yours: to avoid dependencies wherever possible in the first place

You lack the relevant facts to even be able to speculate about this. You haven't even done an adequate job grappling with the details presented here without the need for assumptions.

> If me spending a few minutes to find a way to unblock something

Imagine you have a coworker who frequently leaves unwashed dishes in the sink. You wash and put them away, but it happens enough that you decide to bring it up. Now imagine that when you do bring it up, your coworker lectures you, condescendingly and at length, about the steps you can take to "unblock" the dirty dishes problem (by washing them), as if there's some missing piece involving not knowing how and that that's the point of the discussion, instead of the fact that this (entirely avoidable) problem is occurring in the first place.

You're not unblocking anything, nor would this be the place to do so even if you were. Under discussion is the phenomenon that, for all the attention and energy that has gone into NPM, frequently old projects fail on some very basic preliminary step: just being able to complete the retrieval of the dependencies, i.e. the one thing that `npm install` is supposed to do. You voiced your skepticism and then with every response to this thread moved the goalposts further and further away, starting out generally dismissive that the problem exists, then wrapping up by offering your magnanimity to what you choose to see as someone struggling.

There is no struggle here, nor are any of the necessary conditions that would make your most recent comments relevant satisfied. Like the earlier anecdote about the annoyance of dealing with the type of person who jumps in to offer pointers about how to change a failing test case so that it no longer reveals the defect it was created to isolate, these are responses that fail at a fundamental level to understand the purpose and greater context that they're ostensibly trying to contribute to.

If `npm install` is broken on a Thursday and annoys the person who ends up forced to work through that problem, and then you show up on a Saturday with a explanation after-the-fact about what to do in situations like the one that happened on Thursday, what possible purpose does that serve? At best, it makes for an unfocused discussion, threatening to confuse onlookers and participants alike about what exactly the subject is (whether the phenomenon exists vs morphing this into a StackOverflow question where there's an opportunity to come by with the winning answer and subtly assert pecking order via experience and expertise). At worst, it does that and also comes across as incredibly insulting. And frankly, that is the case here.

> You may disagree that the way NPM does things works well enough to be widely adopted (and dare I say, liked by many)

By your count, how many times have you moved the goalposts during this, and how many more times do you plan on moving them further?

> I don't see much value in simply putting up with some barely working codebase out of some sense of historical puritanism

Major irony in relation to the comment above and given the circumstances where this discussion started. Shocking advice to let your source control system manage your source code and examine the facts about whether late-fetching dependencies the NPM way makes it worth the cost of putting up with the downsides that I brought up and the recurring security downsides that lead to writeups like the article that was originally posted here.