[lmm]

IME, encouraging people to only run part of the system results in a more fragile environment, and devs who can't fix problems in the wrong part of the system or change boundaries that were put in the wrong place. Everyone should be encouraged to be full-stack; specializing on one part or the other is ok, but you should be able to chase things into other components where necessary.

From the talk of "packages" I think the original was talking about code dependencies. But it's worth saying that you can manage external dependencies the same way, with something like puppet.

[iends]

I wasn't trying to advocate only running part of the system.

Of course you can use things like puppet, but the comment I was replying to was saying these were solved problems in the Java world for more than a decade which isn't exactly true.