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A comment on Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014). Parent comment

Re:Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014) by eeZah7Ux on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @05:41AM (#25122187)
> these are used when you're making your own builds anyway

That's the problem: they encourage building with tons of random stuff pulled from the Internet on the fly, sidestepping OS distributions completely and providing no reproducible building, no vetting, no license review, no long-term security.

The leftpad disaster is a good example.

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Re:Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014) by einpoklum on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @07:09AM (#25122812)
Can you link to a description of "the leftpad disaster"?

Also - it's not supposed to be "tons of random stuff", it's supposed to be the libraries you're relying on. Maybe I'm missing something in the point you're making?

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Re:Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014) by eeZah7Ux on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @11:19AM (#25125519)
Random link: https://www.davidhaney.io/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-how...

> it's supposed to be the libraries you're relying on

When an ecosystem has poor engineering practices and encourages small libraries with many dependencies you get a quadratic explosion of indirect dependencies.

You might not care about having 100 transitive dependencies until a poor soul has to maintain your code in 4 or 10 years from now.

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