GitHub is almost forever. Your custom domain disappears when you stop paying the bills, which if you’re an open source developer has a higher likelihood than GitHub disappearing.
One day, we’re all going back to vendoring dependencies.
GitHub is almost forever. Your custom domain disappears when you stop paying the bills, which if you’re an open source developer has a higher likelihood than GitHub disappearing.
One day, we’re all going back to vendoring dependencies.
Why did we stop vendoring dependencies in the first place?
I think its a good question. The short answer is: because tooling doesn't default to this or make it easy.
The answer to the question of why THAT is the case - is not so easy to answer. The main benefit I can see with using lock files instead of vendoring is that it saves a lot of storage and diff history from entering your repository. So clones are much faster, backups smaller etc.
I think Go used to work this way (automated vendoring) but it’s the only language I can think of that ever did in terms of standard tooling. It would be instructive to learn why that changed.
Because it sucks. But maybe it should suck? It would make us think twice before adding dependencies.
I use dotnet and I never liked seeing dlls and binary files in my diffs. I would argue if we are adding vendor code to our projects, we should demand the FULL source code instead of dlls. Maybe it is already possible with things like x unit. I have never given it much thought... But then that vendoree code has to come from somewhere as well, right? I mean there is something to be said about provenance or something here?
Sorry if this feels like a stream of consciousness because it is ↔
Vendoring dependencies doesn’t necessarily mean you have to include binary objects in your repo. They could be content-addressable artifacts in your org’s private blob store.
i.e. they could be NIH git-lfs.
I vendor all my Go dependencies all the time for every project. It is the way.
Has this ever been necessary/useful? Genuinely curious because I’ve been using Go since 2012 and can’t recall a time when vendoring solved a problem better than “regular” modules. Like have there been times when the source went down and the module proxy went down (or didn’t have your dependency cached)?
Because its not as convenient
Can you elaborate?
Updates mean you have to copy over all the code into your repo, which creates a large diff, and hope you aren't overwriting any local changes someone might have made.
It bloats your repo, both with the actual code, and the large diffs when you update it.
You have to manually track new versions, without something to tell you if new versions are available, or if your version has known security vulnerabilities.
If the dependency has it's own dependencies, you have to vendor those too recursively. And if multiple dependencies have the same transitive dependency, it is up to you to deduplicate them, and make sure you have a version compatible with all dependents.
Etc.
Disk is cheap.
Recursive dependencies have the same issues whether you vend them or not.
Ensuring that diffs to updated dependencies remain within a vendor folder is trivial.
So, what’s left?
> Disk is cheap
The biggest problem isn't (usually) disk space, or network bandwidth, it is that git operations slow down as the size of the repo grows. And it means that cloning or pulling the repo takes longer, which can be especially problematic for CI.
> Recursive dependencies have the same issues whether you vend them or not.
Package managers usually handle resolving recursive/transitive dependencies for you. Some have support for vendoring dependencies, but not all do. In theory, you could have similar tooling for vendoring dependencies, but in practice that often isn't the case.
These are all solvable problems IME. But it does mean you need people who are experienced at solving them or who care enough to learn.
> Disk is cheap
If I want to upgrade the disk on my MacBook Pro, I need to buy a new MacBook Pro with a larger disk. If I want to upgrade the disk on my work laptop, I’m SOL.
> Ensuring that diffs to updated dependencies remain within a vendor folder is trivial.
It’s not obvious to me how putting the dependencies in a vendor folder solves the diff problem. Does every code host allow you to hide diffs to certain directories?
And what’s the advantageous scenario for vendored dependencies? Is it just when the mod proxy and the upstream code host go down at the same time?
We didn't!
In the case of a typical software enterprise having your domain gone means that you probably don't care about the code anymore anyway.