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There's nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem is npm allows any random person to upload packages. It's completely untrusted. Contrast that with Linux

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem is npm allows any random person to upload packages. It's completely untrusted. Contrast that with Linux distributions which have actual maintainers who take responsibility for their packages. They don't generally allow malware to make it into the official software repositories. In many cases they went as far as meeting each other in person just to set up a decentralized root of trust with PGP. It's so much better and more trustworthy. The truth is npm, pip, rubygems, cargo and all the other programming language package managers are just fancier versions of the silly installation instructions you often find in README files that tell people to curl some script and pipe it into bash.

graemep 1y ago
Even when random people are allowed to contribute (AUR, PPAs) there seems to be more scrutiny and fewer incidents. Possibly because they are secondary to the main repos and possibly because the people who use them are made aware of the risks. NPM etc. are a bit like Arch would be if everything was in AUR.
- cozzyd 1y ago
  With PPAs or COPR (or third party repositories, e.g. slack) you have to explicitly enable each repository too. Even if a repository is enabled by package you are prompted the first time a new repository is used (actually I don't know if that's true when gpgcheck is disabled? If not this would be an easy fix in apt/dnf)