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441 points longcat | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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f311a ◴[] No.45038992[source]
People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year.

This week, I needed to add a progress bar with 8 stats counters to my Go project. I looked at the libraries, and they all had 3000+ lines of code. I asked LLM to write me a simple progress report tracking UI, and it was less than 150 lines. It works as expected, no dependencies needed. It's extremely simple, and everyone can understand the code. It just clears the terminal output and redraws it every second. It is also thread-safe. Took me 25 minutes to integrate it and review the code.

If you don't need a complex stats counter, a simple progress bar is like 30 lines of code as well.

This is a way to go for me now when considering another dependency. We don't have the resources to audit every package update.

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coldpie ◴[] No.45039464[source]
> People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year.

I was really nervous when "language package managers" started to catch on. I work in the systems programming world, not the web world, so for the past decade, I looked from a distance at stuff like pip and npm and whatever with kind of a questionable side-eye. But when I did a Rust project and saw how trivially easy it was to pull in dozens of completely un-reviewed dependencies from the Internet with Cargo via a single line in a config file, I knew we were in for a bad time. Sure enough. This is a bad direction, and we need to turn back now. (We won't. There is no such thing as computer security.)

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rootnod3 ◴[] No.45039683[source]
Fully agree. That is why I vendor all my dependencies. On the common lisp side a new tool emerged a while ago for that[1].

On top of that, I try to keep the dependencies to an absolute minimum. In my current project it's 15 dependencies, including the sub-dependencies.

[1]: https://github.com/fosskers/vend

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skydhash ◴[] No.45039849[source]
Vendoring is nice. Using the system version is nicer. If you can’t run on $current_debian, that’s very much a you problem. If postgres and nginx can do it, you can too.
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1. coldpie ◴[] No.45040128[source]
> If you can’t run on $current_debian, that’s very much a you problem.

This is a reasonable position for most software, but definitely not all, especially when you fix a bug or add a feature in your dependent library and your Debian users (reasonably!) don't want to wait months or years for Debian to update their packages to get the benefits. This probably happens rarely for stable system software like postgres and nginx, but for less well-established usecases like running modern video games on Linux, it definitely comes up fairly often.

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2. teddyh ◴[] No.45044431[source]
Something I have seen that recently have become much more common is the software upstream authors providing a Debian repository for the latest versions of their software, including backports for old Debian releases.
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3. rcxdude ◴[] No.45045007[source]
Yes, mainly because such repositories don't have to follow debian's policies, and so it's a lot easier to package a version that vendors in dependencies in a version/configuration you're willing to support (and it's better to point users there than at an official debian version because if debian breaks something you'll be getting the bug reports no matter how much people try to tell users to report to the distribution first)