[xamuel]

I wonder how much dependencies could be reduced by systematically searching low-hanging fruit and addressing it ad hoc. For example, if commonly-used library A uses one minor thing from (and thus imports all of) library B, which in turn imports hundreds of other libraries, then someone should add the minor thing in question to A and remove the dependency on B there.

It's interesting to think of how this sort of "neighborhood watch" could be incentivized, since it's probably way too big of a task for purely volunteer work. It's tricky though because any incentive to remove dependencies would automatically be a perverse incentive to ADD dependencies (so that you can later remove them and get the credit for it).

[remram]

Then the code for library B still exists, still potentially has bugs, the only difference is that the same bug has to be fixed by project A1 then again by project A2 and project A3 etc. There is a cost there too, outlined in the recent article 'Tech Debt: My Rust Library Is Now a CDO' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39827645

[abathur]

I guess there's a hybrid model where you're able to select exactly what you're depending on and pull it in dynamically at build/package time.

I've thought a little about, for example, building something that could slice just the needed utility functions out of a Shell utility library. (Not really for minimizing the dependency graph--just for reducing the source-time overhead of parsing a large utility library that you only want a few functions from.)

Would obviously need a lot of toolchain work to really operationalize broadly.

I can at least imagine the first few steps of how I might be able to build a Nix expression that, say, depends on the source of some other library and runs a few tools to find and extract a specific function and the other (manually-identified) bits of source necessary to build a ~library with just the one function, and then let the primary project depend on that. It smells like a fair bit of work, but not so much that I wouldn't try doing it if the complexity/stability of the dependency graph was causing me trouble?