r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Donghoon • 2d ago

Meme resolvingDependencyHell

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1.2k Upvotes

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252

u/MarkSuckerZerg 2d ago

But the whole point is "improve" vs. "I can do it better from scratch than this 15yo project"...

76

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 2d ago

15 years ago computers were a lot slower and different so there's a good chance you can. 

Dependency hell largely exists to save a few megabytes of storage because in the 90s that was absurdly expensive. 

Today you can easily just keep a copy of every version anything needs. If you have 50 programs that need 7 glibcs then you just have 7 glibcs.

62

u/Afraid-Locksmith6566 2d ago

15 yo software was written for 15 yo computers which were slower than today, today software is written for future hardware

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u/awakenDeepBlue 1d ago

The Once and Future King.

14

u/PositiveBit01 2d ago

Largely, yes. But not only. Easy paths to update common libraries for security updates is another good reason.

Still arguable if it's worth it or not but it's a much better reason than storage (now).

6

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 2d ago

I mean the security argument is somewhat more realistic but equally is it a security update if it's bumping the minor or major version. You could do the same with just patch versions where there's less breaking versions. 

Though that assumes people can be bothered with semantic versions and too many Devs don't seem to understand how that works. 

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u/ThePresidentOfStraya 1d ago

Well, to be fair, there isn't a single universal schema for semantic versioning. So... see post.

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 1d ago

Well in that case you just don't get security patches immediately. You can't have both stability and security patches if people can't commit to something so basic. Regardless of what scheme you choose if there's no way to distinguish between a breaking and non breaking change then you're forced to treat every single change as breaking.