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by nightfly 2 hours ago
> since it's the only package manager that I know of that allows for package authors to essentially run arbitrary post-install scripts silently package install

Are you sure? I'm pretty sure .deb and .rpm packages both allow that
2 comments
YuechenLi 1 hour ago
>Are you sure? I'm pretty sure .deb and .rpm packages both allow that Learned something new today. Thanks.

I think the other significant issue with the NPM ecosystem that makes it bad in particular is NPM's dependency management is genuinely the worst out of any package manager because of phantom dependency is the default: you can be using a package without ever knowing that you are using it because it is imported implicitly, and the JS ecosystem dependency is so weird that taking down a small package that that a major project depends on cripples the entire JS ecosystem, as shown in left-pad, and launching a cyberattack via npm can be as easy as putting malicious code in any small package that large, popular packages depend on and watch it propagate. This is not hypothetical, it has been done, repeatedly in fact, over the years.

TS is a good programming language, however NPM is a security nightmare, and somehow the collective reaction of everyone depends on the JS/TS ecosystem seems like a shrug and "oh well, what can you do".

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captn3m0 1 hour ago
Package-level hooks are everywhere: https://github.com/ecosyste-ms/package-manager-hooks

I wrote this in response to the recent AUR attacks. The problem isn’t really too many dependencies - it is that most users cannot be auditing everything they install and we need mechanisms that help users where they are.

I audit my AUR pkg builds, and I would have likely caught any malware. But so would a Dependency Cooldown or a third-party threat feed. Package Managers should make it easy to build this tooling via hooks.

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tetha 2 hours ago
Both certainly do. My own hypothesis on why this isn't a more widespread problem is the speed, or lack thereof, of these ecosystems. By the time a package hits debian stable, it's usually been under scrutiny for a year or more.
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