On Fri, 11 Dec 2020, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
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.
Isn't this, what we are doing currently? When developing a library we try to stay within a major version range as long as possible, but if we need a breaking change, we increase the major version and have to adapt depending packages.