[paskozdilar]

What mechanism, if not the presence of import statements, do you use to locate all the places where a certain package is used in a large project?

[dmitriid]

1. You build your project, and it fails in the places where API changed.

IDEs can even pinpoint those locations without building a project

2. You run tests and they fail if the behavior changed

Literally nowhere is "oh, do an automatic search/replace of imports" is a tool for fixing your project or figuring out necessary changes. Except in go, apparently.

[paskozdilar]

Willingness to play russian roulette with major versions may work in small organizations. In large-scale, you can't risk subtle behavior change that still compiles. That's the source of many black magic debugging sessions.

[dmitriid]

Grepping and replacing import paths isn't a good tool for finding subtle behavior changes. Especially in big projects.

[paskozdilar]

Yeah, but checking each line of code that uses the import is. Especially in big projects.