I hope that whatever solutions we come up with to handle the too-many-dependencies problem don’t stifle people’s motivation to create and share new packages. It’s not a given that useful libraries are going to exist. Too much friction and people will just stop sharing code.
-
Show this thread
-
Replying to @pcwalton
The C way of dealing with dependencies and the Node way of dealing with dependencies are extremes. I don't want to be in either. My sense is that we are heading towards the Node extreme without thinking too critically about it. Some pressure against that heading seems healthy!
1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes -
Replying to @burntsushi5
I think it is an issue that’s on a lot of people’s minds, and it is worth thinking about. I just don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @pcwalton @burntsushi5
We’re already starting to see Rust libraries advertise few dependencies, so I don’t necessarily agree that we aren’t thinking critically about the problem.
2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes -
Replying to @pcwalton
My sense is that is only a recent development, and it has only come up because people are starting to make noise about it. IMO anyway. We need to keep encouraging folks to think critically about bringing in dependencies.
2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes -
Replying to @burntsushi5 @pcwalton
agreed. I think more visibility & some tweaks in multiple places would help everyone think about it more. for example http://crates.io could show an additional flat list of default transitive dependencies of a crate, to more easily show what it actually brings in
1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
we were using the color-backtrace crate, which is really nice, but we realized afterwards that it added an additional 15 transitive deps which wasn't obvious at a first glance on https://crates.io/crates/color-backtrace …. still likely works for most, and is a good crate, but was too much for us
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
agreed. I wish we had some tools for now at least to reinforce keeping dependencies light. It's easy to forget about that.
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
Replying to @mitsuhiko @repi and
I used this as an inspiration to cut down dependencies on my console crate which also cuts down my better-panic crate a lot.pic.twitter.com/CkrH2Jy3gC
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
Yeah, I use that in Pathfinder. Mostly I consider it a courtesy to my users, not a way of life, though. I won’t go out of my way to reinvent something complicated (like SVG parsing) just to reduce dependencies.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.