I don't think the left-pad problem wasn't about package namespacing it was about the ability to unpublish packages as well the prevalence of micropackages caused by lack of a decent standard library.

Also npm's bad policy/decision to transfer control of package in the name of predictability(this should probably be avoided for packages that aren't malicious. You could argue for seizing broken/trivial and unmaintained packages that have a good name but even then it might be best to leave well enough alone).

I suppose you're talking about the original dispute which led the developer to unpublish his libraries (which npm stupidly allowed, and cargo didn't). There's a smaller chance of a company wanting a random package namespace then a package name but its not impossible (think Mike Rowe Soft vs Microsoft)

> I don't think the left-pad problem wasn't about package namespacing it was about the ability to unpublish packages as well the prevalence of micropackages caused by lack of a decent standard library.

It was "about" cavalier approach to the dependency supply chain. A dependency disappearing outright is just one of many failure modes it has.

> The left pad issue was kind of wild coming from the enterprise Java space.

This may be a little off topic for this comment thread but this is a little misrepresentative. Hosted private repos for enterprise weren't exclusive to Java at the time of left pad - anyone doing enterprise node likely had one for npm too & were probably well prepared for the attack. Such enterprise setups are expensive though (or at least take a level of internal resources many companies don't invest in) leaving the vast majority exposed to both js & java supply chain attacks even today.

At the time Nexus was free to self host, and that is what many smaller teams did just that to archive known good packages for the CI pipeline, I'm not in the Java space anymore so I don't know if that's still the case.

Yeah it's all a bit of revisionist history here, or I guess a bit ignorant. I had a friend who worked at Sonatype from pretty early days and they were, as I understand it, specifically working in this area of infrastructure for vetting, signing, license checking, etc. for corporate environments that needed to be extra careful about this stuff.

That crates.io launched without explicitly acknowledging this whole problem is either naivety or worse: already by then Java wasn't "cool" and the "cool kids" were not paying attention to what happened over there.

It's not that the industry wasn't paying attention until the 'left pad incident' -- that only holds if one's definition of "the industry" is "full stack developers" under the age of 30; I remember when that happened and I was working in a shop full of Java devs and we all laughed at it...

Maven's biggest problem was being caked in XML. In other respects it was very well thought out. That and it arrived at the tail-end of the period in which Java was "cool" to work in.

It's not revisionist history, the wording I chose was meant to acknowledge that there were segments of the industry that did take dependencies seriously. I'm very much aware that the Java world had a much more robust approach to dependencies before this, but "the industry as a whole" includes all the Node shops that were hit by leftpad as well as all the Python and Ruby shops that were using equally lousy dependency management techniques.

Rust chose to follow the majority of languages at the time. Again, as I noted in my previous comment, I'm not defending that decision, just pointing out that most of the widely-used languages in 2014 had a similar setup with similar weaknesses.