Jon Pretty

The scala world takes a step towards source dependencies.https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1028612858156920832 …

Not sure they’re going to solve anyone’s problem. They don’t address diamond dependency issues, not to talk about source rather than binary compatibility issues…

this is not true. Source deps completely eliminate binary runtime errors: a whole class of errors removed. Next, it never requires publishing: a whole class of project management task removed. It does not solve source incompatibility, but that is easier to reason about that bin.

Secondly, if you have source incompatibility, you definitely find it in CI, not at runtime trying to find versions that don't throw exceptions in test or prod.

To play devils advocate: you will always need publishing because you cannot assume your users use your build tool, though. And note that source errors >>>> binary errors, and the likelihood of a binary error that is not caught by tests is pretty under 5%.

I find it amazing how skeptical scala devs are of source deps, but rust, haskell and many other communities seem to use them just fine.

I’m pretty much on board, but it’s important to be precise. Publishing will not go away unless you’re working in a silo company that has no need to share artifacts with the rest of the world (which is pretty exceptional).

I don't think so. Builds are usually simple. I think we could easily design a standard way to describe dependencies and compilation flags other than sharing compiler output. Approximately zero effort has been expended on this compared to the effort on sharing binary artifacts.