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posted by martyb on Thursday January 24 2019, @10:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the ask-the-PHB dept.

Russ Cox, who developed the dependency/package management system for Go, writes about the problems with software dependencies. A choice excerpt:

Dependency managers now exist for essentially every programming language. [...] The arrival of this kind of fine-grained, widespread software reuse is one of the most consequential shifts in software development over the past two decades. And if we’re not more careful, it will lead to serious problems.

A package, for this discussion, is code you download from the internet. Adding a package as a dependency outsources the work of developing that code [...] to someone else on the internet, someone you often don’t know. By using that code, you are exposing your own program to all the failures and flaws in the dependency. Your program’s execution now literally depends on code downloaded from this stranger on the internet. Presented this way, it sounds incredibly unsafe. Why would anyone do this?


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @05:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @05:56AM (#791631)

    implementing it, testing it, fixing it, adding features to it, and so on. Other people do these things, and you sit back and benefit stay up at night dealing with sudden breakage

    FTFY. We are NOT in your fantasy world of rainbow-pooping unicorns and infallible upstream devs; we who write and maintain real code, have to deal with the ugly reality as it is.

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