[rnijveld]

I don’t think our dependency tree is perfect, but I think our dependencies are reasonable overall. We use JSON for transferring metrics data from our NTP daemon to our prometheus metrics daemon. We’ve made this split for security reasons, why have all the attack surface of a HTTP server in your NTP daemon? That didn’t make sense to us. Which is why we added a readonly unix socket to our NTP daemon that on connecting dumps a JSON blob and then closes the connection (i.e. doing as little as possible), which is then usable by our client tool and by our prometheus metrics daemon. That data transfer uses json, but could have used any data format. We’d be happy to accept pull requests to replace this data format with something else, but given budget and time constraints, I think what we came up with is pretty reasonable.

[stavros]

If you're only dumping a string, couldn't you replace this dependency with some string concatenation?

[rnijveld]

Probably, but we still need to parse that string on the client side as well. If you’re willing to do the work I’m sure we would accept a pull request for it! There’s just so many things to do in so little time unfortunately. I think reducing our dependencies is a good thing, but our dependencies for JSON parsing/writing are used so commonly in Rust and the way we use it hopefully prevents any major security issues that I don’t think this should be a high priority for us right now compared to the many things we could be doing.