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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

>I run `npm update` once a week and it brings down a dozen or so updates

That's my worst nightmare. This kind of thing always results in my having to spend hours figuring out which of the new updates broke everything and what do I have to do to fix it.

Once I have something working, I don't want updates to ever be installed unless I know 100% for sure that it is only fixing a security issue.

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I never had that issue. But I had issues with native extensions often, a few years ago it occurred often enough that I would favor JS only if I could find an alternative. But I also avoid webpack because that always did break with updates, maybe now is more stable? Regardless, dependency management is hard. Every time I would do some c++ I would waste a lot of time just trying to get things to compile. Worst experience for me has been with iOS apps, I would make an app, wouldn’t need to touch it for a while and then I would have to update iOS version, which required a new Xcode version, which required a new Mac version, and then Swift’s API would have changed and things wouldn’t work. Dreadful. I guess my takeaway is that software rots fast

You can use automated testing to verify if your functionality is still there.

If that's too much work you can just deploy to a subset of your users (after npm audit) and let the error monitoring system tell you about the new exceptions.

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