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by dragonwriter 2896 days ago
The catch to the vgo approach required that no package in the ecosystem ever have even unintentional backwards incompatibilities, because you can't do anything other than specify minimum versions. Or, rather, it makes the resulting problems something that need to be addressed outside the scope of dependency specification and resolution.

When you just decide not to address a significant part of the problem, the solution becomes simpler.
1 comments
eikenberry 2896 days ago
> unintentional backwards incompatibilities

You mean a bug? Because that's what that is and it is no different from any other bug, and like any other bug they are outside the scope of dependency specifications as they are unintended.

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dragonwriter 2896 days ago
> like any other bug they are outside the scope of dependency specifications

Known relevant bugs in particular versions of dependencies are not outside the scope of what non-vgo dependency management solutions address.

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slrz 2895 days ago
Maybe they should be. If you can make it work, fixing the bug seems like the obviously superior solution compared to letting it fester and working around it locally with incompatibility declarations, slowly degrading the ecosystem up to the point where you have lots of little islands that can't be used together anymore in a sane manner.
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dragonwriter 2895 days ago
> If you can make it work, fixing the bug seems like the obviously superior solution compared to letting it fester and working around it locally with incompatibility declarations

Fixing the bug creates a new version. Unless you are going to create the mess of unpublishing packages or replacing packages with new different ones with the same identified version (both of which are problematic in a public package ecosystem), the fact that maintainers should fix bugs that occur in published versions doesn't , at all, address the issue for downstream projects that is addressed by incompatibility declarations in a dependency management system, even before considering that downstream maintainers can't force upstream maintainers to fix bugs in the first place.

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