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What Happens When the Maintainer of a JS Library Downloaded 26M Times a Week is Unavailable?

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 29 2020, @08:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the questionable-dependencies dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In November 2019, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the popular core-js library, lost an appeal to overturn an 18-month prison sentence imposed for driving his motorcycle into two pedestrians, killing one of them.

As a result, he's expected to be unavailable to update core-js, a situation that has project contributors and other developers concerned about the fate of his code library.

Pushkarev, known as zloirock on GitHub, mentioned the possibility he may end up incarcerated in a thread last May discussing the addition of post-install ads to generate revenue for a project that so many use and so few pay for. He anticipated he may need to pay for legal or medical expenses related to his motorcycle accident.

In that thread, developer Nathan Dobrowolski asked, "If you are in prison, who will maintain [core-js] then?"

Pushkarev offered no answer. Since his conviction last October, the need to resolve that question has become more than theoretical.

-- submitted from IRC

So dear soylentil developers, are there any libraries you are depending on that have a single point of failure?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by NCommander on Monday March 30 2020, @09:55AM (2 children)

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Monday March 30 2020, @09:55AM (#977157) Homepage Journal

    Pulse can dynamically reroute audio streams and stream over the network. It also acts as an intermediately layer for the 500+ sound APIs that have appeared over the years.

    I don't like Pulse, but ALSA is a fucking nightmare to work with, and a horrid case of NIH after OSS came out of the kernel.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @06:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @06:51PM (#977305)

    Adding in such performance overhead to PulseAudio so that it is network transparent was as dumb of a mistake as was adding network transparency to X11's low level drawing commands.
    Optimizing for network transparency should be done at the application layer, not the audio layer.
    I'm afraid X11 continues to inspire open source programmers--with bad ideas.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2020, @01:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2020, @01:02AM (#977450)

    Pulse also sucks up around 5% of my cpu when idle. It also puts out white noise after a while, when you least expect it.