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Reducing Dependabot Noise
- anishgupta 10mo agoHad fun reading this, pretty well written. >Consolidate into a monorepo lol this sounds like as if you make a dog tired by playing with it so it sleeps which you're gone :'D >Contextualize the actual risk This is not as easy as it seems, for example reflection cases where runtime behavior affects a package usage. example: const lib = require(process.env.PARSER) lib.parse(userInput) could use a safe parser in production or a vulnerable one in another environment, but from a code level perspective there's no certainity which package is actually used
- doodlesdev 9mo ago> Modern languages like Zig, Gleam, and Roc offer genuine productivity benefits and attract top talent. As a bonus, their ecosystems are young enough that security tooling has not caught up yet. Dependabot will add support eventually, but until then you get the best of both worlds: a modern stack and a quiet PR queue. How the hell is that actually a good thing? You might as well just use another language and disable Dependabot security updates if that's what you're looking for. Dependabot security updates aren't a liability, they're an asset in a world where developers use hundreds of dependencies daily, where every few months one of them is going to have a XSS or RCE vulnerability that has to be patched ASAP. > And if you are really concerned about a dependency’s security, you can always rewrite it yourself in Rust over a weekend. That's not how it works. Honestly, this blog post gets me really worried about this developer's projects and clients. > Remove lockfiles from version control What the fuck.
- williamjackson 9mo agoThank you for expressing my thoughts as well. The article seems to be full of contradictory “advice”. Use a dependency cooldown, okay … but don’t commit your lockfile so you are always running the latest transitive deps? That’s nuts.
- Uvix 9mo agoDepends on the package manager. With some you'll get the oldest transitive deps that meet all dependency requirements, not the newest.
- equinumerous 9mo agoThe "> Remove lockfiles from version control" got me as well. > Reproducible builds sound nice in theory, but velocity matters more than determinism. Think of it as chaos engineering for your dependency tree. Reproducible builds are nice in practice, too. :) In the Node.js ecosystem, if you have enough dependencies, even obeying semver your dependencies will break your code. Pinning to specific versions is critical.
- wirelesspotat 9mo agoI'm pretty sure the article is joking > If the vulnerability were critical, someone would have merged it by now. > GitHub Copilot can automatically suggest fixes for security vulnerabilities. Instead of updating to a patched version, let AI generate a workaround in your own code.
- doodlesdev 9mo ago> I'm pretty sure the article is joking Went right over my head LOL it actually made me angry reading it earlier hahaha Well, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I didn't take it as a joke because I've seen some of these things recommended before (including not checking in lockfiles) in other contexts.
- lanyard-textile 9mo agoI started to reevaluate the seriousness of this advice with the going to jail prompt. I probably should have caught on sooner :)
- doodlesdev 9mo agoI didn't manage to get to that point of the article out of pure anger... He got me all right LOL
- yunwal 9mo agoHow did you reach "Set open-pull-requests-limit to zero" and not recognize this as satire?
- doodlesdev 9mo agoYou wouldn't believe how many of these things I've seen seriously recommended before. Also, I do have difficulty detecting sarcasm sometimes (even though I'm very fond of it). Lovely article :)
- torton 9mo agoExcellent troll post. I've had a good chuckle.
- williamjackson 9mo agoAt sufficient scale, Dependabot’s analysis will time out before completing, effectively rate-limiting the number of PRs it can generate. This natural throttling prevents notification fatigue while maintaining the appearance of active security tooling. Am I being trolled?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- amitav1 9mo agoI believe so
- lanyard-textile 9mo agoDenial: "These dependabot MRs aren't even fixing real security issues, these do not exist in the wild." Bargaining: "Okay we'll fix them but we'll do it on a schedule, so that it doesn't interrupt sprints." Anger: "Okay let's just yoink the package lock file how about that?" Depression: [skip ci] Acceptance: "So apparently copilot can do this..."
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- blibble 9mo agoseems the easiest way is to switch from Microslop GitHub to another platform
- zero_shift 9mo agoI wasn't sure for a while, but this must be satirical - mustn't it?
- vlovich123 9mo agoIn this thread we get to see which usernames display an inability to detect very obvious satire.
- zahlman 9mo agoPresumably there are also people who simply disagree with the message being delivered through the satire... ? ... Or conclude that the message is contradictory such that it's basically just trolling?
- wiether 9mo agoI laughed twice: once while reading the article, the second time reading people getting mad at the author in the comments!
- odo1242 9mo agoA lot of them, it seems
- Tade0 9mo agoI would laugh, but I've met too many people who either adore busywork or worse - seem to think no amount of additional manual stuff that one has to do will ever be a problem.
- hypfer 9mo agoHonestly it needed an LLM to tell me that it is satire, because I tuned out at the 20% mark. The author seems to be so deep in the radioactive weeds that even if it is satire and they're distancing themself from it, they're still likely to already have experienced a near-lethal dose. Worded differently, I would argue that anyone who sees this and _understands it_ is stuck in something very unhealthy and needs to get out very fast. Using this level of satire as a coping mechanism just prolongs what shouldn't be prolonged (or exist in the first place).
- igortg 9mo agoIt got me until "Remove lockfiles from version control"
- AdrienPoupa 9mo agoI gotta admit you had me thinking this was serious until the `Remove lockfiles` section ;)
- doodlesdev 9mo agoI stopped there and had to read the answers to my comment to find out and revisit it. In hindsight, this is absolutely hilarious. Might be one of my new favorite pieces of software satire (because of how realistic, albeit absurd, it is).
- coryrc 9mo agoNot "you can always rewrite it yourself in Rust over a weekend"?
- gpm 9mo ago"If it has been mass maintained by some random person in Nebraska since 2003, that is battle-tested infrastructure." comes before that.
- darkamaul 9mo agoI love all the touches that went into creating the Dependabot configuration: – Sunday at 3 a.m. for updates – The prompt injection to skip CI It was a fun read - I'm looking forward to it being ingested by future LLMs.
- bumblehean 9mo agoThis is why you shouldn't waste your money on expensive "consultants" like this guy. We've had 100% success in reducing Dependabot noise by disabling it in our repos. Why should we pay this guy to configure it for us and still end up with Pull Requests being opened?
- anematode 9mo agoThis is really terrible advice. > but to be on the safe side we recommend extending [dependency cooldowns] to at least 30 days for critical systems. I'd say at least a year, no? The xz backdoor took a couple months to find, and that was only because we got lucky -- had it never been found, Jia Tan and his buddies probably would have gotten enough useful data after a year, so it'd be irrelevant at that point anyway. > Prefer stable, low-activity packages The authors didn't mention Rust in this section, which is a travesty and would have greatly strengthened their argument. Sooo many "abandoned" projects in cargo are just finished and need no maintenance.
- rschiavone 9mo agoI added the suggested dependabot.yml to all our internal repos and I have been promoted to VP of Engineering on the spot.
- dystopiandevel 9mo agoCongratulations, well deserved. 100x impact.
- lmeyerov 9mo agoData poisoning at its finest, wow
- cluckindan 9mo agoThis reads like satire.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- chuzz 9mo agoTook me a while to recognize it’s satire because I’ve seen some of these proposed unironically in the wild :,)
- swisniewski 9mo agoTake a look at pr-bot: https://github.com/marqeta/pr-bot https://github.com/marqeta/pr-bot The answer to dependabot, or snyk prs is to automatically merge them once all the status checks pass. This free your devs from having to worry about patching. PR-BOT will let you define policy on when it’s ok to automerge prs.
- jtbayly 9mo agoI don’t have experience with dependabot at all. I didn’t realize it was satire. I just kept thinking, “This sounds like terrible advice. This can’t be right.”
- swisniewski 9mo agoThis is not satire. If you have a large dependency graph, you are going to have a lot of vulnerable stuff. Letting one computer send you patches and the other computer merge it for you when all your tests pass is a good thing.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- istillwritecode 9mo agotry reducing dependencies.