new | ask | show | jobs
Someone1234 13 hours ago  [ - ]

I’m sure we’d all welcome your alternative and or superior proposals.

Without that, this just comes across like unconstructive commentary.

This moves the needle a little your proposals or the lack thereof don’t move it at all. So I’ll take this over nothing.

spartanatreyu 12 hours ago  [ - ]

We already have alternative and superior proposals, it's called Deno.

It's node + npm compatible and its permission system locks everything down by default.

If you know ahead of time, you can turn on which permissions something is supposed to have in the config file.

Or you can just not use a config file at all. Anytime it needs a permission: it asks you what it wants. You can say yes or no, and those are saved in the config file for next time. If you say no, the script throws an error where it tried to access something it didn't have permission for.

---

Example:

- My linter wants access to my file system?

  - You can have read access to ./src/ts/
- My bundler wants read and write access to my file system?

  - You can have read access to ./src/ts and write access to ./build-output

  - Huh, what's that? The bundler was trying to both read and write a file in ./src/ts?

  - We don't want input files getting overwritten, that's a recipe for hard-to-diagnose race conditions. Looks like the permission system did more than just keep things secure, it's like a type system for IO.

  - Oh, look at that, there was a very subtle bundler misconfig, let me fix that now. How long would that have existed if we didn't use deno...
- Oh what's this? An updated dependency I've been using for 6 months suddenly asking for access to my .env file, and asking to run curl in a separate process? How about "no". Why would a simple DOM utility dependency be asking for those permissions? Ah, looks like it was part of a credential stealing supply chain attack. Glad I wasn't using node.

---

Addendum: Node now has a permission system, but it's broken by design so it's useless.

tpetry 2 hours ago  [ - ]

Can you clarify why the node permission system is broken but the deno one works? For an outsider like me both look like the same.

TZubiri 9 hours ago  [ - ]

You'll notice that my comment was a question, you can tell by the presence of question marks at the end of the sentence.

Additionally, if a comment were to hypothetically point out an issue, that is valuable on its own. If someone reacts to a comment that points out an issue this defensively, it's a huge red flag.

mschuster91 13 hours ago  [ - ]

An idea might be to not just pin "package xyz allowed", but "package xyz postinstall allowed with hash <1234>".

jffry 12 hours ago  [ - ]

The default behavior for the automated "add everything existing to the allowlist" is to include the specific version: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/using-npm/config#allow-script...

Together with a lockfile that does achieve "package xyz postinstall allowed with hash <1234>"