Skypack shows German language README for Alpinejs

[earthboundkid]

See https://www.skypack.dev/view/alpinejs.

It should show https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine/blob/master/README.md but instead shows https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine/blob/master/README.de.md.

Also made an issue on Alpine in case the error is on their end: alpinejs/alpine#867

[FredKSchott]

Thanks for the ping! @drwpow any idea why this could be happening? It looks like we're just trying to fetch README.md from the repo, which appears to be english.

[drwpow]

This is fascinating! To be honest, I’m baffled. The reason we show a German README is because that‘s what npm told us the readme was:

http://registry.npmjs.com/alpinejs

According to npm’s registry they even specify "readmeFilename": "README.de.md" almost to double down on this. So for this package in particular, npm was really keen on making sure we showed German 😅 .

My best guess as to “why German” is: if you look at that package’s repo, of all the files that start with README*, README.de.md is the first, alphabetically. My guess is that they do a scan for any file starting with README and take the first, even if README.md exists.

However, if you go to npm’s package page for AlpineJS, they show the English version:

I don‘t really know how to explain the difference between what npm is giving us and what they‘re displaying on their end.

A little more detail that may explain the issue: with Skypack we want to be as-close-as-instant to npm as possible. This means that if we took the extra time to fetch a remote README for every package, we would start slowing down and it could take quite a while between when packages are published to npm and when they show up on Skypack.

However, we’ve had some other issues with npm’s data, so I think we need to have something running in the background that re-populates all the READMEs, without slowing down our update times. But all that said, this is the first time I’ve seen this behavior. So thanks for raising it! 🙂