enquirer VS event-stream

jonschlinkert (Jon Schlinkert) · GitHub

Although I'm happy there is a way to bundle Node.js apps with support for pnpm, and for a modern-ish version of Node.js, it's somewhat slow in my experience to build locally. Interactivity doesn't have the greatest ecosystem there, especially with TypeScript. Best library I've found is Enquirer.

{ "name": "@jonschlinkert/omit-deep", "description": "Recursively omit specified keys from an object", "tags": ["object", "deep", "remove", "omit"], "version": "0.3.0", "author": "Jon Schlinkert (https://github.com/jonschlinkert)", "repository": "jonschlinkert/omit-deep", "bugs": "https://github.com/jonschlinkert/omit-deep/issues", "license": "MIT" }

In case you need to ask for user input, optionally you can use a prompt file. This is very useful to customize the output of the generator. Prompts are defined using a library named Enquirer.

> I don't fully understand why packages like this are so popular.

It actually works like this: Author X develops `iseven`, `isodd`, etc. No one really downloads such packages. Author X then develops `importantPackage` which does do something useful developers out here download. Now `iseven`, `isodd` are downloaded alongside `importantPackage`.

My point is, we should recognize certain NPM authors as toxic, but I guess "freedom of speech/code" stops us from doing so. Example of such an author: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/

something like enquirer

You're thinking of Jon Schlinkert, publisher of 1435 packages on npm.

It's insanely funny to me that these packages exist while one of his bigger projects (https://github.com/enquirer/enquirer) lists the following reason under "why use it":

> Lightweight - Only one dependency, the excellent ansi-colors by Brian Woodward.

It's written by this guy, who shits out micro libraries by the hundreds. He moved the project to another user under the pretense that he was learning to program back then, but a lot of his stuff is similarly inconsequential micro libraries.

Another possible outcome of "I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know": https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

Whole npm ecosystem is so fragile.

Remember event-stream[1]? Did we learned something from that? Yes, we might. So was it improved? Never. People are still installing 'new' colors package and wondering why its texts are broken.

What if he uploaded malicious code rather than just just gibberish?

[1]: https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

foo-bar version 1.0 depends on bada-boom 1.0 which depends on bada-bing 1.0. Now you update to foo-bar 1.1 because of some critical update, which in itself now depends on bada-boom 2.0 and bada-bing 2.0. But unbeknownst to you and the author of foo-bar, the bada-boom and bada-bing project was taken over by another maintainer who made an update, but also added some trojan horse code to specifically attack certain users, which was obfuscated and remained undetected. Which has happened before - not just browser extensions are affected by malicious attackers taking over useful projects.