4 ms·
"Dropbox has a lot of third-party dependencies, some of which cannot even be rebuilt from the sources that it has. That is generally true of any company that ha
by keithpeter 11y ago
"Dropbox has a lot of third-party dependencies, some of which cannot even be rebuilt from the sources that it has. That is generally true of any company that has millions of lines of Python in production; he also saw it at Google. That also makes switching hard."
Why can't these dependencies be built from the source they have presumably the same version as the currently build binary? Is it because other components of the build chain have changed or what?
As a civilian, I found this situation mildly disturbing.
- jessaustin 11y agoPerhaps there are licensing issues?
- jofer 11y agoAt least in my experience, it's very common for vendors to provide you with the source (through a licensed agreement) but deliberately limit your ability to build it. Sometimes this is through licensing, sometimes it's by excluding some key portions of the build chain (e.g. internal libraries that don't directly relate the the functionality of the software). At any rate, at my current employer, we have lots of things where we have the source as well as the libraries and headers, but don't have the capability to build those libraries from source. It sounds silly, but it's still vastly better than having no source access whatsoever. At least for us, we often need to understand an implementation detail of a proprietary library, but being able to actually build things is secondary.
- keithpeter 11y agoGood heavens - 'ransom strips'[1] in software. I had no idea. Best of luck with it all... [1] http://www.rics.org/uk/knowledge/glossary/ransom-strips/ http://www.rics.org/uk/knowledge/glossary/ransom-strips/