Wednesday, 5 December 2018

NPM's messy web of dependencies and tiny, trivial modules

A while back there was a post on Reddit, on most likely one of the main programming subreddits, that discussed a seemingly major issue with Node and NPM. The issue was a specific developer creating dozens of tiny, ~10LoC-sized modules for trivial things (like making a string upper case) but with fake inter-dependencies to all their other "micro" modules, such that if someone were to use one of them it would pull in all of them.​I remember using a dependency visualizer like https://ift.tt/2AT9upn and seeing a giant messy web of dependencies for a module that: 1. should not need any dependencies, and 2. did not really need to be a fully-fledge module in the first place. I also remember some of these modules being widely used.​Can anyone point me to the Reddit post, or one of the NPM modules, or the username of the singular developer making the modules?

Submitted December 05, 2018 at 04:50PM by ProbablyNotCanadian

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