The last time I tried to update quartz (my content management system) it wanted me to update npm, the Node Package Manager that runs JavaScript packages. That time, the npm upgrade deleted all the content files from my web site and I discovered that my backups had been broken for a while. I recovered, and have very good backups of all my content now.
This time, npm gave an error message and gave me a rather odd “we screwed everything up, but we’re not going to fix it but rather tell you how to do it” error message:
What I discovered was that, rather than “Your cache folder contains root-owned files, due to a bug in previous versions of npm”, that npm had written garbage in almost every directory under its control and, no, their simple ownership fix wasn’t going to help.
I had to nuke my entire npm and quartz install from orbit, re-install everything, then restore my content from the backups that happen nightly. What a nightmare.
Doesn’t anyone test this stuff? I expect this from the likes of Apple and Microsoft, but FOSS is usually a whole lot better.
—2p
Addendum 20250205@19:24
Having to restore the entire quartz system seems to have messed up my colors and the RSS syndication. I’m working on it.