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This is a great write up, but it seems to be missing a key ingredient to deciding to use a dependency. That is, are you willing to become a contributer on the
by tomohawk 7y ago
This is a great write up, but it seems to be missing a key ingredient to deciding to use a dependency. That is, are you willing to become a contributer on the project, and/or are the maintainers open to your participation. Example: You may really want to use a dependency, but test coverage is lacking. Are you willing to contribute the test coverage?
The open source model is about building an alliance with others so that you do not have to create the whole tech stack yourself. It's the only way to compete with a monopoly and win.
- fauigerzigerk 7y agoThat's certainly important for some users for some dependencies. But most users cannot and should not contribute to most of their dependencies. The overhead of reviewing all those contributions would be enormous, and the effort required to make a quality contribution that doesn't waste other people's time would be impossible to justify in most cases.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoalso getting involved in a project also means dealing with its politics and drama, too. And the entitlement, criticism and blame from users. and in a lot of cases, it would be less effort to write the functionality you actually need (and the tests for it) than writing the tests for an entire OS project (and then dealing with all the other crap).
- lonelappde 7y agoPeople say this and then you find out it means that they brag about reducing their dependencies by 1%. How big the code base for your entire system. We're not shipping 128kB cartridges anymore.