Conill: The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions

> make updating dependencies easier

Granted, it's a easier to find dependencies of something, but that's still only part of the problem. If upgrading a dependancy is so easy as bumping a dependency version, there is no reason for projects to religiously want a single version either, but they do and they say it's for good reasons. The constant API changes that occur bring with it one of the issues that contributed to the zlib fiasco taking so long to solve: many projects embedding the library edited the interface and so finding the code was not enough -- extra work was needed to merge in the fix, same as if the new upstream's API changed.

> waiting out for some more until things stabilize

I wish this were more true, but that utopia never seems to come. For some reason, that I can not read out of any big picture, for GUI libraries (GTK & Qt) 25+ years of continuous development, 30-40 years of prior art and three or four major API changes were not enough for things to stabilise. In this time frame things didn't change that much either: we still use the same primitives (buttons, binary on/of switch, sliders, menus, etc.) as when GUIs started being a thing.

> it might be what *their* distro packages

What I'm saying is that there are not that many distributions and relevant versions of each. In other words, there is no "combinatorial explosion". Even between distros many are pretty similar in their package version choices (e.g. they often co-ordinate on Linux versions).