3 ms·

Yes, semantic version numbers won't solve everything. But, another problem is too many dependencies, which is independent of the version numbers being used. Som

Yes, semantic version numbers won't solve everything. But, another problem is too many dependencies, which is independent of the version numbers being used. Sometimes dependencies can conflict, although sometimes there is the way to do it without conflicting. I try to avoid too many dependencies in my programs. I still think that semantic version numbers are still helpful (for released versions; unreleased versions can just use the hash), even though it doesn't always help. If you do depend on undocumented behaviours (or behaviours that are documented to be changed in future), you can specify that you require only one specific version, or a range of versions that they have been tested with. They say "version numbers are unique, orderable identifiers of software releases", and I agree, but you can still do that and still use semantic version numbers too.

lamontcg 5y ago
You gotta realize we're discussing Google and you're talking about things which should hopefully be fairly obvious. And while reducing deps makes sense to any developer experienced enough to have been bitten hard by it, Google faces the problem that due to its size there will be lots of highly specialized code dealing with issues that would too trivial for nearly any other businesses to bother extracting out into dependencies. You should always make things as simply as they can be and no simpler. At Google's scale simple things will be necessarily highly complicated and specialized. You're also still talking about issues of concern to you which don't have any bearing at all on monorepo-vs-manyrepo. Fewer deps are clearly better in either model.