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"The way to solve the problem of dependency hell is to version every function... always ship every old version of every function..." This seems like hell to ma

by asah 4y ago

"The way to solve the problem of dependency hell is to version every function... always ship every old version of every function..." This seems like hell to maintain and transitively speaking, a mountain of code. For this much work, I'd prefer to invest in obscenely detailed unittests that allow the team to retire old function-versions and everybody stay on HEAD. That said, I can imagine cases where old-versions might be helpful for some period of time, and you could call them via their function name and commit hash... then a dependency detector only keeps old versions as needed, a warning tool detects ancient versions to consider retiring, etc. You'd need editor/debugger support so developers can see and interact with old versions, and I'm not sure how this works with raw text editors - perhaps the dependency detector copies the (transitive) code into a new subdirectory?

0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Yeah, I updated my comment to reflect that, you definitely would only need versions of functions on disk where some code depends on it. That's basically how container layers work. I think CI/CD practices are really important to get rid of the old code. Automated build systems should be constantly downloading new versions of deps and running tests so devs can fix bugs quickly and release new versions that depend on new deps. The quicker that cycle happens, the quicker old code can disappear, new functionality can be implemented, bugs can be fixed, etc. Because everything would still use pinned versions of deps, it would still work exactly as it was tested, so you wouldn't be sacrificing reliability for up-to-date-ness. Speed and automation of that process are critical.
abathur 4y ago
You might find a video of unison language interesting. (I'm not sold on there approach per se, but they do grapple with this problem and its logistics.)

by asah 4y ago

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

Yeah, I updated my comment to reflect that, you definitely would only need versions of functions on disk where some code depends on it. That's basically how container layers work. I think CI/CD practices are really important to get rid of the old code. Automated build systems should be constantly downloading new versions of deps and running tests so devs can fix bugs quickly and release new versions that depend on new deps. The quicker that cycle happens, the quicker old code can disappear, new functionality can be implemented, bugs can be fixed, etc. Because everything would still use pinned versions of deps, it would still work exactly as it was tested, so you wouldn't be sacrificing reliability for up-to-date-ness. Speed and automation of that process are critical.

abathur 4y ago

You might find a video of unison language interesting. (I'm not sold on there approach per se, but they do grapple with this problem and its logistics.)