[nsajko]

The Julia world is already quite careful with testing and CI. Apart from the usual unit testing, many packages do employ integration testing. The Julia project itself (compiler, etc) is tested against the package ecosystem quite often (regularly and for select pull requests).

[maxbond]

I certainly didn't mean to imply that Julia's community was incompetent or that they were not doing integration testing. CRAN's approach (which is mandatory integration testing against all known dependents enforced by the packaging authority - the global and mandatory nature being what makes it different) is genuinely innovative and radical. I don't think that's an approach that should be adopted lightly or by most ecosystems, but I do observe that a.) these languages have similar goals and b.) it's an approach intended to solve problems of much the same shape as described in the article.

Again I think this approach is too radical for most ecosystems, but Julia is pursuing a similarly radical level of composability/reusability and evidently encountering difficulties with it, so I think there may be a compatibility there.

[nsajko]

I don't think testing against every existing dependent would make sense currently. The issue is the lack of tooling for mechanically checking whether the dependent accesses implementation details of the dependency, in which case it would be valid for the dependency to break the dependent.

There are some proposals to forbid the registration of a package release which trespasses on the internals of another package, though.

I hope someone tackles the above sooner or later, but another issue is the approach of testing every known dependent package might be very costly, both in terms of compute and manual labor, the latter because someone would have to do the work of maintaining a blacklist for packages with flaky unit tests. The good news is that this work might considerably overlap with the already existing PkgEval infrastructure. We'll see.