https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd
https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even
https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
Would you prefer it just sat there unfixed and unsupported?
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.
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).
> 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.
[…]
I rarely see people use that feature yet tons of repos on Github are essentially dead.
This article will be very useful for people who might shift back to older PHP versions for compatibility and face it.