There is nothing wrong with it. The point I am making is that “import” is overloaded to mean two distinct things in most languages: declaration of build “argume

There is nothing wrong with it. The point I am making is that “import” is overloaded to mean two distinct things in most languages: declaration of build “arguments” and supplying build “parameters”. It is like defining a function, f(x) and then asking for how to make x = 5 always. Well, you get rid of the parameter and create a local variable in the function named x and set it to 5. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But, it would be utterly absurd to make function argument declaration look exactly the same as local variable declaration and initialization. You should have distinct syntax for those two very different operations. Unfortunately, for build arguments and parameters, every commonly used language I am aware of either only supports one form and punts the other form to the build system or attempts to do both using the same form. That is why it is a mess. As for versioning, that is actually a “type” problem. When you take a parameter in a function you are usually expecting it to conform to some type or interface guarantees. Build arguments should do the same, but again, I am not aware of any languages that actually manifest the “type” of a package that can be used in a build argument. So, we are stuck with the wonderful world of untyped build arguments that we shoehorn in with “type annotations” (i.e. version ranges) in the build system.