It’s worth noting that npm forbids squatting
- "Squatting" on a package name that you plan to use, but aren't actually using. Sorry, I don't care how great the name is, or how perfect a fit it is for the thing that someday might happen. If someone wants to use it today, and you're just taking up space with an empty tarball, you're going to be evicted.
- Putting empty packages in the registry. Packages must have SOME functionality. It can be silly, but it can't be nothing. (See also: squatting.)
What’s interesting about it is that they don’t exactly define what squatting is.
- Get the author email with
npm owner ls <pkgname>- Email the author, CC support
- After a few weeks, if there's no resolution, we'll sort it out.
Don't squat on package names. Publish code or move out of the way.
And it seems to work. I haven’t seen reserved crates on the much larger npm. It has reached the point where most trivial names are taken and some of them are dead, but they’re taken by packages, not squatters. And it’s encoraging to know they’re not lost forever and could be revived if someone interested came along.
npm, despite being a company, is not very big. They definitely have much higher package per admin ratio than cratesio, so this is a solvable problem.