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what a broken ecosystem.. The crazy thing is not that the package exists, but that it is used by JS devs.

There’s a bit more nuance as to why. It’s not fair to say that the average JS dev is reaching for a package like is-odd/is-even.

Years ago when npm was just getting started there was a lot of experimentation and land grabbing for packages. A few “prolific” developers were pushing these tiny utilities and then using them in their own projects which ended up being required as deps in other projects and then snowballed into is-odd being included in webpack at some point (I think I have that timeline roughly correct).

It’s still a crappy problem for sure but it’s not fair to paint most JS devs with a brush so broad.

I feel like I have to remind people of this quite often, but the history is such that npm was lightweight at one point, bundling wasn't a thing, and while `isodd`/`iseven` are of course silly, things like `isarray` were not functions that existed back then (we didn't have Array.isArray). `typeof [] === 'object'` in JS, so e.g. my package `is-arrayish` checked for a similar structure to an array (whereas Id guess `isarray` checked for the prototype). `isarray` failed for the `arguments` keyword, which was needed for variadics before argument spreads were added to the language I believe in ES5.

So of course they don't make sense now. But they were created for a reason. Before even Markov chains were a fad - let alone LLMs - we were trying to be as efficient as possible and maximize code reuse I stead of writing the same helper functions over and over again. That's what you're seeing.

I hate to bring politics into such discussions, but this thought struck me as funny.

The hubris of humanity... what you're describing is akin to the US Constitution and the Founding Father's goals, ending in Donald Trump.

Node is the same horror.

Nice ideas, great premise, and all turned to garbage in the end.

I think a lot of things end up that way, just at different timescales. Best we can do is learn from them and start again, IMO - however that looks.

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions". Still true, probably thousands of years after the sentence was coined.

54m agoHN ↗

These packages are basically memes at this point... Those download figures cannot be accurate for real production usage.

I don't believe any programmer is actually using these. isarray and left-pad are at least functions that didn't used to be in the standard library, to slightly excuse them.

I’d say the deciding factor is that it has bugs where both fixing and not fixing them can have a negative impact. If there were no known bugs and there was no harm in using it, I’d probably just leave it there and not disturb anything, given that its use is so widespread, and instead merely note in the documentation that its purpose has become obsolete.

From the article:

So I had a decision to make. I could dive back into PHP after almost a decade away, hand the package to one of the people who’d offered, or let it keep sitting there.

We are in the AI era. As a maintainer of an open source project that I haven't touched for years, I would first start by asking an AI to produce a fix for the issue and check what it proposes. This definitely reduces the mental load and risk of breaking an old codebase that so many users depend on.

Deprecating the project is playing the open source game in an other dimension: tell the word that depending on this project was a bad idea in the first place and that everyone should move on. But releasing a fix on a deprecated project is fine too.

So both actions are on different dimensions, this isn't a choice between 2 options.

The man released a fix twelve years ago for free. If someone is really depending on this, they can fork it themselves. I'd argue that that's the beauty of open source, rather than a downside.

The down vote was me - I really think calling deprecating a project after a decade+ telling the world 'depending on this project was a bad idea' is tone deaf.

Others would say pragmatic.

I think it shows a complete misunderstanding on what free software is.

Free software is Free (and free software is free, libre software is libre, …, where the free/Free/libre/OS/… distinctions are relevant). That does not guarantee continued maintenance for decades, and to expect such is the sort of entitlement that puts some people off sharing their work and playthings.

It doesn't say that depending on it was a bad idea, but that depending on it going forward is a bad idea, and they've gone the extra mile and made an announcement including information about what better alternatives are not available.

Would you prefer it just sat there unfixed and unsupported?

Why don't you do it?

We are in the AI era, it doesn't change the fact that investing 1 hrs a month (or even a week) into a long-dead project in a language you no longer use is more investment than 0 hours for the rest of your life.

And yes, if your timeline as a dependency enjoyer is "is this project going to be maintained for 15 years" and you still assumed the answer is yes, it's kind of on you adding a dependency.

Even with AI, the result needs to be reviewed both to make sure it is actually correct in what it intends to do and that it does not have knock-on effects anywhere else. Given the description of the bug I'd think that spinning up the AI and pointing it in the right direction would save no time over just fixing the issue completely by hand.

Fixing the issue could set an expectation in current users of the package that it might get updates going forward, which it obviously won't from this maintainer, potentially reducing any impetus that might exist to move over to something that is a more correct solution these days. Handing over control of the project where it is has risks which are stated in TFA.

So while both fixing and deprecating could have been done, I think the right choice (just mark it as deprecated) has been made. Not fixing the existing bug(s) will not break anything that is using the package any more than it is already broken. If one of the existing issues had potential to be a security issue then I might err more towards fix+deprecate (with big red text included in any announcement of the fix to the effect that this is the last one and future issues won't get resolved upstream).

44m agoHN ↗

The cool thing about open source is anyone can fork it and spend their own money asking AI to make a fix.

6h agoHN ↗

We used to work together at AOL. Glad to see you on here; I hope you're doing great!

Reading this threw me back to 2014 - how was working for AOL back then?

6h agoHN ↗

Love you kept it alive this long

4h agoHN ↗

It hasn't been updated in 11 years. Not sure I'd call that "keeping it alive".

It doesn't seem to have gone moldy considering how many people have installed it in recent time.

Sometimes not touching something that works is the best way to keep it working!

There is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix that works.

For a package with that kind of install base, is there a final release that prints the migration options in a deprecation notice? People will find it years from now through old Stack Overflow answers.

[1] https://packagist.org/packages/jakeasmith/http_build_url

The package is marked as abandoned on Packagist [1]

This package is abandoned and no longer maintained. No replacement package was suggested.

Both adding it as a dependency using composer and installing it from a lockfile results in:

    $ composer require jakeasmith/http_build_url
    […]
    Package jakeasmith/http_build_url is abandoned, you should avoid using it. No replacement was suggested.
    […]
    $ rm -r vendor/
    $ composer install
    […]
      - Installing jakeasmith/http_build_url (1.0.2): Extracting archive
    Package jakeasmith/http_build_url is abandoned, you should avoid using it. No replacement was suggested.
    […]

It would have been nice if a replacement had been suggested.

Replacement is defined in the github repo, in composer you can only define an replacement package, but there is no real replacement, just alternative ways.

46m agoHN ↗

Read the linked entry.

4h agoHN ↗

Reading this made me really nostalgic. I cut my teeth in web/software dev in the Laravel 5.x days, and it's quite jarring comparing the day-to-day we have now with back then!

Should the repo be archived?

I rarely see people use that feature yet tons of repos on Github are essentially dead.

+1 on this - Jake's done the best thing with deprecating the package (which shows up locally in tooling and will also be surfaced by static analysis tooling (ie security vendors) based on that, but also archiving the repo indicates it to anyone who lands on the repo

Crazy that the bug went unnoticed. So many sites must have been broken by the "a" bug.

It only kicks in in the presence of a trailing / - perhaps this is rare where the function is commonly used.

Thanks for pointing this out. I used PHP for one of my professional projects and never came through this - maybe because the library was not a part of our codebase.

This article will be very useful for people who might shift back to older PHP versions for compatibility and face it.