My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it

Sander_Marechal•about 3 hours ago

There is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix that works.

jakeasmith•1 day ago

Author here, happy to answer any questions. I never imagined a polyfill for http_build_url would gain so much traction. After 12 years, deprecating it feels like the right move, especially given the new options from the community and PHP itself.

layer8•13 minutes ago

I’d say the deciding factor is that it has bugs where both fixing and not fixing them can have a negative impact. If there were no known bugs and there was no harm in using it, I’d probably just leave it there and not disturb anything, given that its use is so widespread, and instead merely note in the documentation that its purpose has become obsolete.

HackerThemAll•about 1 hour ago

The JavaScript world is littered with stuff comparing to which your patch seems like a complex project. See those examples:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even

https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-whitespace-character

https://www.npmjs.com/package/isarray

JaggerJo•about 1 hour ago

what a broken ecosystem.. The crazy thing is not that the package exists, but that it is used by JS devs.

junon•39 minutes ago

I feel like I have to remind people of this quite often, but the history is such that npm was lightweight at one point, bundling wasn't a thing, and while `isodd`/`iseven` are of course silly, things like `isarray` were not functions that existed back then (we didn't have Array.isArray). `typeof [] === 'object'` in JS, so e.g. my package `is-arrayish` checked for a similar structure to an array (whereas Id guess `isarray` checked for the prototype). `isarray` failed for the `arguments` keyword, which was needed for variadics before argument spreads were added to the language I believe in ES5.

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.

yurishimo•44 minutes ago

There’s a bit more nuance as to why. It’s not fair to say that the average JS dev is reaching for a package like is-odd/is-even.

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.

laruss5•about 3 hours ago

For a package with that kind of install base, is there a final release that prints the migration options in a deprecation notice? People will find it years from now through old Stack Overflow answers.

TimWolla•about 2 hours ago

The package is marked as abandoned on Packagist [1]

> 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.
    […]

[1] https://packagist.org/packages/jakeasmith/http_build_url

amhoab•about 3 hours ago

We used to work together at AOL. Glad to see you on here; I hope you're doing great!

yard2010•about 3 hours ago

Reading this threw me back to 2014 - how was working for AOL back then?

AltruisticGapHN•41 minutes ago

Should the repo be archived?

I rarely see people use that feature yet tons of repos on Github are essentially dead.

crumb1e•about 1 hour ago

Reading this made me really nostalgic. I cut my teeth in web/software dev in the Laravel 5.x days, and it's quite jarring comparing the day-to-day we have now with back then!

Codefrontier•about 3 hours ago

Love you kept it alive this long

hdjrudni•about 2 hours ago

It hasn't been updated in 11 years. Not sure I'd call that "keeping it alive".

My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it

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