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A comment on How I write back ends. Parent comment

Re:How I write back ends by jessaustin on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @08:45AM (#22117461)
You can specify exact versions, but your deps might wildcard with "~" or "^" or they might specify a range of versions. Thus, a new dep of a dep might be installed the next time you update.

I wonder whether one of the npm alternatives has a "--sane" mode that would always pick the oldest possible dep...

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Re:How I write back ends by t0astbread on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @09:32AM (#22117818)
Why the oldest possible?
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Re:How I write back ends by jessaustin on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @10:17AM (#22118202)
Thread hypothesis is that we want to avoid breakage due to automatic dependency updates. So, don't update dependencies automatically. Now sure, if you tell the tool to update a particular dep, it will force second- and higher-order deps to update to compatible versions. It will always use the oldest compatible version, so nothing will get broken in surprising fashion. This seems strange to people who've used mostly npm and node, but tools for other languages have this policy.
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Re:How I write back ends by t0astbread on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @04:37PM (#22122316)
I see. I've never heard of that before, thanks for sharing!
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