One developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Chris Williams writing for The Register:

Programmers were left staring at broken builds and failed installations on Tuesday after someone toppled the Jenga tower of JavaScript.

To fix the internet, Laurie Voss, CTO and cofounder of NPM, took the “unprecedented” step of restoring the unpublished left-pad 0.0.3 that apps required. Normally, when a particular version is unpublished, it’s gone and cannot be restored. Now NPM has forcibly resurrected that particular version to keep everyone’s stuff building and running as expected.

“Un-un-publishing is an unprecedented action that we’re taking given the severity and widespread nature of breakage, and isn’t done lightly,” Voss explained about an hour ago.

“This action puts the wider interests of the community of NPM users at odds with the wishes of one author; we picked the needs of the many. This whole situation sucks. We will be carefully considering the issues raised by and publishing a post-mortem later.