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no this is the fundamental engineering issue... there is no magically mythical perfect package manager, and even if one exists there is a real intrinsic cost to
by apalmer 11y ago
no this is the fundamental engineering issue... there is no magically mythical perfect package manager, and even if one exists there is a real intrinsic cost to adding a dependency. It is not a huge cost... it is minor... but the benefit of using a one line package is also minor... so when you are making a minor trade off over and over again as with npm where its not unsually to end up depending on 1000s of packages... then this is not a trade off that should be made without thinking...
just saying be an engineer. weigh the costs
- naasking 11y agoI never said perfect, I said good. Some basic properties are that upstream changes don't break downstream dependents if you've protected against automatic version updates.
- marssaxman 11y agoAnd yet, automatic version updates seem to be the first thing people bring up in defense of package managers when I mention that I generally think they're a poor strategy. It's a lot like DLLs/shared libraries, actually: people marshal the same old arguments every time explaining why they are a great idea in theory, but in practice, there seems to be a whole hell of a lot of work being done to make up for the fragility you bring on board with a system like that, and I'd rather just embed the source or link it statically (depending on which context we're talking about here) so that I don't have to waste any time thinking about it.