alt Hacker NewsI really wish that the FAIR package manager project had been successful, but they recently gave up after the WordPress drama died down.
FAIR has a very interesting architecture, inspired by atproto, that I think has the potential to mitigate some of the supply-chain attacks we've seen recently.
In FAIR, there's no central package repository. Anyone can run one, like an atproto PDS. Packages have DIDs, routable across all repositories. There are aggregators that provide search, front-ends, etc. And like Bluesky, there are "labelers", separate from repositories and front-ends. So organizations like Socket, etc can label packages with their analysis in a first class way, visible to the whole ecosystem.
So you could set up your installer to ban packages flagged by Socket, or ones that recently published by a new DID, etc. You could run your own labeler with AI security analysis on the packages you care about. A specific community could build their own lint rules and label based on that (like e18e in the npm ecosystem.
Not perfect, but far better than centralized package managers that only get the features their owner decides to pay for.
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That would be a really interesting platform for an npm alternative. I think the incentives are a little better aligned than in the WordPress ecosystem, but maybe not enough.
Assuming that the majority of repositories will be malware with SEO hooks, how would one locate a safe directory using only a search engine (as opposed to whispered tips from coworkers, etc)? I don’t see how proliferation of repositories improves things for users. (Certainly, it does serve up the usual freedom-from-regulation dreams on a silver platter, but that’s value-neutral from a usability perspective.)
We didn’t give up! We’ve pivoted efforts - focussing more on the technical part of the project, and expanding into other ecosystems. We’re currently working with the Typo3 community to bring FAIR there, as well as expanding further.
(AMA, I’m a co-chair and wrote much of the core protocol.)