Ending Dependency Chaos: A Proposal for Comprehensive Function Versioning

Re:Ending Dependency Chaos: A Proposal for Comprehensive Fun... by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Friday March 03, 2023 @07:28AM (#35008640)

This will make the chaos worse. Instead of having to figure out compatible versions of dozens of packages, you will now have to figure out compatible versions of thousands of functions.

The solution to dependency chaos is grouping dependencies together and versioning the larger group, not splitting into even more dependencies.

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Re:Ending Dependency Chaos: A Proposal for Comprehensive Fun... by davibu on Friday March 03, 2023 @08:48AM (#35009577)

I think at this point we should quantify the proportion of "inflationary" updates (i.e. those that bring absolutely nothing in terms of functionality or security) versus real updates.

Let's take a fictional example: I import D3.js to use the parseDSV() function, after 2 years the method has not received any updates, but the package has gone from version 1.0.2 to 5.0.2. With a granular system, my function would still be on version 1.0.2 (because no changes were made), but with the current system I would have received an unnecessary update.

So, in this case, granular versioning would actually help to put an end to the chaos of dependencies.

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Re:Ending Dependency Chaos: A Proposal for Comprehensive Fun... by IanCal on Friday March 03, 2023 @10:02AM (#35010465)

Wouldn't there be a bunch of releases with newer numbers? Or would that function maintain a module number of 1, while other functions in the same file would have updated to 2,4,5?

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