Sure, but removing or unlisting a valid package could break projects. The folks maintaining the package ecosystem need to be careful.
Let’s say there’s 10 spam uploads per hour and it takes you 1 second to verify a package is spam and remove it. That’s 30 minutes a week just dealing with spam. While I was on the .NET package manager, we had the on-call engineer handle this thankless chore.
Could you detect these packages at upload time? Yes, but spammers will change their patterns once the package ecosystem gets too effective at detecting current patterns. Perhaps machine learning could help, but often times package manager teams are small and don’t have expertise in this area. Regardless, package removals require human review.
Let’s say there’s 10 spam uploads per hour and it takes you 1 second to verify a package is spam and remove it. That’s 30 minutes a week just dealing with spam. While I was on the .NET package manager, we had the on-call engineer handle this thankless chore.
Could you detect these packages at upload time? Yes, but spammers will change their patterns once the package ecosystem gets too effective at detecting current patterns. Perhaps machine learning could help, but often times package manager teams are small and don’t have expertise in this area. Regardless, package removals require human review.