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On the other hand, inserting a volunteer middleman between the developer and the user cause extra unnecessary friction, delays, and has even been the cause of b
by AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
On the other hand, inserting a volunteer middleman between the developer and the user cause extra unnecessary friction, delays, and has even been the cause of bugs [0], not to mention sometimes they explicitly ignore the wishes of the original developer.
[0] Remember when Debian generated predictable random numbers because a maintainer wanted valgrind to shut up?
- m4rtink 6y agoOn the other hand, stuff like the NPM leftpad issue can't easily happen as the package maintainer "middle man" usually inspects any upstream updates for general sanity. And even if it got in to Fedora for example, it would most likely break only the integration rolling release called Rawhide, where it would be quickly discovered and fixed, never reaching the overwhelming majority of users that are on Fedora stable releases. Now in comparison people using NPM just blindly pulled random stuff directly from upstream without anyone doing any sanity checking at all - no wonder one package vanishing made the whole thing fall over, often directly in production.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoAre we talking about source-code packaging for developers or binary packaging for users? Because the left-pad scenario really doesn't apply in the latter case.