Ask HN: submitting other people's libraries to npm / bower / jam / etc?

[danielstudds]

What do people think about submitting other people's libraries to package registries like npm, bower, jam or other package managers?

I'm against it. I've come across a few circumstances where a branch submitted to the registry and then not kept up to date, or where there are multiple submissions of the same library.

Isn't it much better to ask the maintainer to submit it themselves, and until they do (or if they won't) just install the library directly from their repo (which is supported by both npm and bower; not sure about jam.)

[jakejake]

I think it is polite to communicate with the original author first. They may appreciate having somebody else in charge of package management.

It's not uncommon for an app author to provide only source code and then some other person decides to build and maintain binaries for a few systems. That's been happening for years. The author doesn't want to deal with various systems and compilers, but some other person takes an interest. Putting a lib in a package manager system seems somewhat similar.

Basically I think just communicating with the author is the best policy. And if you submit it - plan to keep it updated.