On 12/11/20 10:52 AM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
Indeed, it's a difficult problem with no obvious solution, but given the combinatorial explosion issue, it's probably better to (somehow) leave it up to a computer to explore that space rather than humans. :)
I'm reminded of the headline from this Onion article: https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-... To fix dependency hell, you need only not cause it in the first place. You have to standardize the language and a useful bit of code that you dub the "standard library." Then anyone writing serious software in your language has to be careful not to break API compatibility, and to use semantic/libtool versioning when doing so is unavoidable. That's an O(n = number of packages) algorithm for detecting breakage because instead of detecting it in every consumer, you're _indicating_ it once. This is what separates languages that a few people use to write software for themselves from the languages that a lot of people use to write software for others. If you don't cause yourself these problems in the first place, then you don't need a not-invented-here package manager, because you can pick up Nix or Gentoo prefix or Anaconda or whatever and simply plug it in. The same is true of build systems. On the other hand, if you want to do something that you shouldn't be doing in the first place (living in Antarctica, climbing Mt. Everest, using a language that breaks itself on Tuesdays, etc.) then specialized tools are often necessary to bring the level of difficulty down from "impossible" to merely "really stupid."