So you want to write a package manager

Re:So you want to write a package manager by davnicwil on Saturday February 13, 2016 @06:37PM (#11096254)

Whilst this is true, it's clearly bad practice to have a 'latest' dependency in any module that is itself designed to be depended upon.

Personally I've never seen this be a problem in practice. Possibly because I'm lucky, possibly because I've only used dependencies that don't do this. Since I mostly use quite popular libraries, and check the dependencies of the more niche ones I decide to use for exactly things like this, I think the latter is probably the case.

Out of curiosity, I wonder if anyone here has hit this problem in practice with npm and could provide a concrete example - in particular with popular open source dependencies?

Yes it's a possible problem in theory, but a lot of problems in software are possible in theory but rarely occur in practice because people follow sensible patterns to guard against them.

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Re:So you want to write a package manager by streptomycin on Saturday February 13, 2016 @07:19PM (#11096415)

I hit it with an unpopular package (like 10 stars on Github). A dependency of a dependency slightly changed its API in a patch release. Fun debugging. So glad we have this auto-install-newer-untested-versions feature as default.

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Re:So you want to write a package manager by wslh on Saturday February 13, 2016 @06:53PM (#11096313)

I was one of the "lucky" people who experienced this. The main module was bitcore-wallet-client

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