Sick of "many dependencies" framing

Posted Feb 11, 2026 23:07 UTC (Wed) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
In reply to: Sick of "many dependencies" framing by mb
Parent article: FOSS in times of war, scarcity, and AI

Wouldn't that work just as well for a few large dependencies if, for some reason, you didn't want to do the vetting yourself though?

I still don't see how many small dependencies is an improvement.

Sick of "many dependencies" framing

Posted Feb 12, 2026 9:53 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

You run into human nature again with the big dependency.

If you're using (say) Qt 7 for a Wayland application running on the Linux kernel, you don't benefit from Qt 7 having thousands of reviews scoped tightly to the Win32 code in Qt; you care about reviews of the Linux/Wayland code, not the Windows code. But the reviewers may well not bother to tell you that their review is scoped to the Win32 code - after all, they're reviewing Qt 7 as they use it, and they're assuming that you know that everyone uses Win32, because that's their life experience.

This puts you at high risk of the "thousands of irrelevant reviews" problem; you see lots of published reviews, and assume that the codebase is well-reviewed. But, in fact, those reviews cover the 80% of the codebase that everyone else uses, and not the 20% that's critical to your project.