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A critique of package managers

(www.gingerbill.org)
109 points gingerBill | 1 comments | 08 Sep 25 12:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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epage ◴[08 Sep 25 13:22 UTC] No.45167934[source]▶
> Dependency hell [0] is a real thing which anyone who has worked on a large project has experienced. Projects having thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dependencies where you don’t know if they work properly, where are the bugs, you don’t how anything is being handled—it’s awful.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell

I find it strange that they use a term with a common meaning, link to that meaning, and then talk about something else?

replies(2): >>45168674 #>>45174832 #
1. ChadNauseam ◴[08 Sep 25 22:22 UTC] No.45174832[source]▶
Same. The first thing I thought was "wait a second, that isn't dependency hell".

The second thing is that their version of dependency hell - having lots of dependencies introducing lots of bugs that you would not have written - is not my experience. 99% of the time, my bugs are in my own code, lol. Maybe once you become a much better programmer than me, you stop writing bugs in your own code and instead start having to deal with bugs in the PNG parsing library you depend on or something, and at that point writing your own PNG parsing library becomes a good use of your time. But I'm certainly not at that point.

I've had to fix bugs in dependencies of course. Here is one I fixed yesterday [0]. But it's much closer to the exception than the rule.

[0]: https://github.com/sanity/pav.rs/pull/4