[jimmaswell]

As an industry we need to stop treating breaking changes as an acceptable thing. The rate of bit rot has accelerated to an absurd pace. I can't remember the package but I had to spend considerable time fixing a build because a package.. changed names.. for NO REASON. They just liked the new name better. This should be career death. You're wasting your fellow humans' time and energy on your vanity when you make a breaking change that is at all avoidable. I should be able to run a build script made 20 years ago and it should just work. No renamed package hunting, no WARNING WARNING DEPRECATED REWRITE ALL YOUR CODE FOR LEFTPAD 10.3 IMMEDIATELY in the console, no code changes, no fuss, we should expect it to just work. This state of affairs is a stain on our industry.

[__MatrixMan__]

One day we will have bled enough and we'll switch to using cryptographic hashes of package contents (or of some recipe for deterministically building the thing on different architectures) instead of anything so flimsy as a name and version number.

For the humans, we can render the hashes as something friendly, but there's no reason to confuse the machines with our human notions of friendliness.

[umanwizard]

You’re basically describing nix and Guix.

[__MatrixMan__]

They use a hash of the derivation and its inputs as a memoization strategy: providing yesterday's answer to today's question since it was asked yesterday. But so far as I know nobody's actually using those hashes for the initial request.

It's not like python will let you:

   import nix.numpy-hsbdjd...8r5z2 as np

Such that the import mechanism ensures that the correct build of numpy is used.

For that to work you'd have to change nix such that the hash did not digest parameters like `amd64-linux` witch indicated the system architecture (you'd want those to be satisfied at import time).

[umanwizard]

In Guix at least (I assume also nix) you can build things from source with a verified hash. I.e. write a numpy package definition that says download the Numpy source from this URL, and expect its hash to be equal to this string. You could then depend on that package from another package ensuring it uses a numpy built from that bit-for-bit exact source tree. Does that not amount to the same thing as what you want?

[knome]

this is why you build to a specific version of a library. drop your build script into a container with the versions of software it expects and it should do fine. containerization is the admittance that versioning environments is needed for most software. I expect the nix/guix crowds to win in the end.

[__MatrixMan__]

Blindly wrapping a build script in a Dockerfile is not nothing, but it's no replacement for being careful while writing that script in the first place.

Otherwise I agree, because if you must be careful, you might as well use tooling that's built for such care. But if you're doing that, do you need the Dockerfile? And that's how you end up with nix/guix.