Other than what happened with 'xz', which was upstream of it getting packaged, how many times has this happened in the debian packages system? Also very popular.
Debian's scale for package distribution is tiny and explicitly curated by maintainers. Everything funnels through Debian. The goals are completely different. Debian packages what's necessary for an OS, npm packages everything needed for any projects arbitrarily. Auditing scales to one of those, not the other.
The quantity of packages that exist at 162150 seems to say to me that there's a great many more than what are "necessary" for the operating system to exist.
sudo apt-cache stats
Total package names: 162150 (5189 k)
Total package structures: 145852 (6417 k)
Normal packages: 69505
Pure virtual packages: 1169
Single virtual packages: 64848
Mixed virtual packages: 355
Missing: 9975
Total distinct source versions: 71172 (1708 k)
Total distinct versions: 71172 (6334 k)
Total distinct descriptions: 139719 (3353 k)
Total dependencies: 435057/121405 (10.6 M)
Total ver/file relations: 73378 (1174 k)
Total Desc/File relations: 142692 (2283 k)
Total Provides mappings: 70533 (1693 k)
Total globbed strings: 268430 (6560 k)
Total slack space: 77.3 k
Total space accounted for: 47.0 M
Total buckets in PkgHashTable: 196613
Unused: 93545
Used: 103068
Utilization: 52.4218%
Average entries: 1.4151
Longest: 19
Shortest: 1
Total buckets in GrpHashTable: 196613
Unused: 86025
Used: 110588
Utilization: 56.2465%
Average entries: 1.46625
Longest: 7
Shortest: 1
162k vs millions. That's not even getting into package update velocity, authorship, the totally divergent goals, etc. I just think it's utterly pointless to compare.
