The author seems to have assumed that readers are going to know that he's talking about NPM and JavaScript, and that "lockfiles" are an NPM-specific feature (to me, it means something completely different).

Perhaps that's a valid assumption for readers of his blog, but once it appears here there are going to be a lot of readers who don't have the context to know what it's about.

Can an "NPM" tag be added to the subject of this post? More generally, I encourage authors to include a bit more context at the top of an article.

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deathanatos 4 days ago | parent [-]

> that "lockfiles" are an NPM-specific feature

… they're not, though. Python & Rust both have lockfiles. I don't know enough Go to say if go.sum counts, but it might also be a lockfile. They're definitely not unique to NPM, because nothing about the problem being solved is unique to NPM.

	▲	_kst_ 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		OK, but to me a "lockfile" is a file whose existence signals that some resource is locked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_locking#Lock_files When I saw the title "We shouldn't have needed lockfiles", I expected something about preferring some other mechanism for resource locking. More generally, I see a lot of articles that talk about an issue in some language or framework that don't mention that context. Just adding "JavaScript" or "NPM" (or whatever) in the title or near the top of the article would be very helpful.