text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
\[52:40\] And there's so many features in the way that Maven can have these nested and parent POMs that is -- I don't really have a background in Java, so I've never used Maven as a user, but the amount of different ways that you can describe the data that is stored in a POM XML, and then published out to Maven Central... |
The worst one is the R package manager. It's not huge, but it is used a lot in the research space... And they don't have an API. You have to scrape HTML from the thing. They also remove packages quite regularly, which is very strange. So R has this really weird -- I think it's because it's come from a scientific kind o... |
\[54:57\] So if you're not proactive in fixing breakages with your package being used with other packages, your package gets removed. It gets kicked out of that registry. Which is pretty wild, because people, especially in science, trying to make their science reproducible, are like "Oh, my package got yanked. How am I... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Until they say "Well, we already published those papers, so... Who cares?" |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** That attitude makes it tough, for sure. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah. There's a lot of still that kind of "Oh, open source is just there. I can just use it. I don't need to contribute back in any way, because someone else will do it." It's still a totally unsolved social problem, I think, in the wider open source space. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, if somebody wants to write a paper on the reproducibility problem in scientific papers due to mismanaged packages in the R language, I think that would be a hit. I think it'd be a hit. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my gosh... I'm still dumbfounded that they would not let you pin to an older version. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** I know. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I feel like that's gonna break so many research projects that go stale, essentially. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Well, there's the Software Heritage Project, which is a massive index of the hashes of every file ever published to any open source thing. It basically was produced to try and help solve that problem. Like, you had to make a full index of every file in every Git repository to be able to try and get ... |
I mean, there are still other package managers that don't have lock files in them, which... If you think like years ago - yes, it wasn't such a problem. But nowadays lock files are so critical to the way people build and maintain and share their software, to be able to go "Oh, it works on my machine. It should work on ... |
**Break**: \[59:34\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Behind the scenes I've had some AI literally obliterating your API... With the polite mode on, of course. I've passed my name in so you can track all the things I'm trying to do here, but... It has finally found a way to craft a script that will pull back essentially some version of curl-fssl blah, ... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Well, there's a lot of -- the schema is not simple. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Unfortunately. And it's hard to find a way to describe that in a way that doesn't just -- people will just switch off and kind of glaze over as you start going into the levels. Something that I've also tried to do over the past couple of years as the AI bots have kind of gone mad is actually let the... |
I have dabbled in the MCP world with this stuff, and it would be very easy for anyone to build an MCP adapter on top of this, but the security implications really hurt my brain. So I have kind of like held off going hard into it, because every string that is returned by the MCP is essentially like a prompt injection. S... |
\[01:06:15.27\] Even GitHub only just recently started kind of saying there are certain restrictions in how you automated the npm publishing can be. Because people were literally like "Every commit, I'll just publish a new version. Why not? There's no restrictions. A hundred versions a day." Which is like, "Why are you... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What is your take then with this rate limits and polling when it comes to this polite nature you have here? How do you leverage that? Because I can pass in my email, but then you say "Well, I can reach out to you later", you're watching my rate limits, of course... Can you just shut me off because o... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** So right now we have this -- we have the anonymous rate limit, which I think is 5,000 requests an hour per IP address, basically... And then the polite pool, which is a term we borrowed from a service called OpenAlex - which is basically like Ecosyste.ms, but for research papers. They have this -- i... |
So far, I haven't actually been tracking that particularly closely. I've literally just like "Great." Cloudflare is still catching most of that stuff before -- if you hit anything that's cached, it doesn't even touch your rate limit. So it's only the uncached things that actually affects that rate limit. But even then,... |
And then looking at the patterns and going "How are people using this? And is there a way I can do a higher-level API that avoids having to have someone do that \[unintelligible 01:08:59.00\]? Or is there ways of being able to export big chunks of data", rather than doing individual... Lots of little queries is another... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:10:24.19\] Yeah. How do you prioritize your time, I suppose? It's a lot to cover, it seems. It seems there's a lot that -- you know, even discoverability. Like, if I am naturally interested, "How can I pull this data out? It seems like I would have to spend a lot of time to figure that out..." ... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Well, to be honest, the number one user is me right now. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, good. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** That's who I prioritize for, because I have a good picture of how you'd want to be able to pull this data out. So the APIs are -- each one has its own open API YAML spec, which kind of tells you "Here are all the different endpoints that you'd want to use." And then I'm building applications on top ... |
Josh Bressers has also had a good amount of input in just like absolutely thrashing various aspects of it to look up lots of data around CVEs, and the kind of rate of versions being published. There's also kind of loads of tools that have been built on top of it. Snyk has a tool called Parlay, which does SBOM enrichmen... |
The biggest thing is just -- coming and asking for things on the issue tracker is a great way to kind of kick off that conversation and say "Oh, I've been trying to do this... I'm trying to solve this problem, but I can't work out how to go through -- I've hit a wall here, or there's just too many individual bits of da... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I've found the introducing Parlay post, they even mentioned that "We're enriching Parlay", it's enriching these SBOMs using Ecosyste.ms. So are they one of your paying customers then, considering this tool is probably part of their...? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[01:13:57.00\] No, they are using -- so Parlay is an open source tool that other people can use. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, gotcha. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** And it's primarily companies, because open source developers don't actually care about SBOMs, because they're like "Here's the code." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I had to search what SBOM enrichments was. I guess I should have guessed that by -- take a little bit of data and make it better, I don't know... \[laughs\] |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Well, most SBOM extractions don't -- like, when you produce an SBOM from, say, a repository or from a Docker container, it will go "Here are the packages and the version numbers", but it's not gonna tell you "And here is all of the information about that package", because they just don't have that o... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned a couple of times building things on top of. Since this is sort of a redo for you, it's kind of like a take two, do it better... Is this the substrate for many things? And what are some of those things that you mentioned? You mentioned some things being built on top of, but what are th... |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** There's a few that are listed on the Ecosyste.ms homepage. So we have the things that I've built for Open Collective, which are the Funds app and the Dashboards app. Those two things are like definitely -- they don't have their own data, they're essentially aggregations of various bits from Ecosyste... |
What I'd really like to build is things that help maintainers understand who is using their software. And this is going back to that 24 billion rows of dependency data, to be able to say like -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How much are bots, how much is Docker pulls, how much is just like CI builds...? I guess those are all still users, right? I mean, if I'm that person releasing a hundred times, I'm still pulling the packages, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Everytime they commit... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It's like "Boom. New version. Because I can", you know? |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, yeah. And also, to be able to go - like, if we can flip that graph upside down and show you "Here are the key people downstream dependencies of your library", then rather than you find out that you broke them because they come into your issue tracker after you just published that release, and ... |
\[01:18:23.06\] But to be able to do that would give maintainers insights that would be like -- they can actually be proactive about some of these things, and maybe even be able to coordinate and go like "Oh, I'm able to reach out to these projects and say "I'm gonna break this thing, or I'm gonna change this thing to ... |
I've also been indexing Dependabot data as a way of being able to show -- I've no idea why GitHub hasn't done this, but as a maintainer of a thing, if I publish a new version, I wanna know how many Dependabot PRs actually were successfully merged, or were closed, as like "No, I don't want this, because it broke my CI."... |
Tools like that, that enable maintainers to do more with the same amount of time that they're putting into the project by being more data-driven, or being able to just have more visibility... Because I think a lot of them are working in the dark a lot of the time, partly because you put the blinkers on and you just foc... |
So that's kind of -- that's my slightly bigger picture of what I would like to build on top of it, is to really empower maintainers to have an impact, to make their process better, but also then make their open source software better... Because everyone uses open source software, and so then you make all software bette... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Andrew Nesbitt:** It's a pretty big goal, but I think there's enough untapped data there that I think can be really powerfully leveraged to make a good go at improving some of these things. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Could you maybe discuss how that interface manifests? Like, what would you show the maintainer? Where would you begin when it comes to exposing the data? Like, how do I get to know my users, the people using my thing? |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.