Hacker News Reader

Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

What's missing from any of this, which has really confused me in the past, is any notion of dependency versioning. We get predefined dependencies as a distribution in quicklisp - which is great as far as it goes - but how do people manage without being able to say "this system depends on a version of that system greater than X"?

View on HN

You can pin dependencies with Qlot or Ocicl (or vendor them with vend), but it might be a long time before you actually need this (the ecosystem is pretty darn stable).

https://github.com/fukamachi/qlot/

https://github.com/ocicl/ocicl/

https://github.com/fosskers/vend/ (new)

TL;DR: If I find a library I'm using would need dependency versioning, I consider that library broken and find (or write) an alternative.

You can always just add a version check and error out if it's too outdated. The thing there isn't an easy way to do is say "this needs a version of that system lower than X" but it would be unusual for a system to intentionally break backwards compatibility (or for an unintentional break to not be fixed relatively quickly after being discovered); usually if there is the semver equivalent of a "major version" change in lisp, the system-name itself gets changed.

Yeah, the liberating thing for me in CL is that things just don’t break as much as they do in other ecosystems. So, when I get breaking changes I look for an alternative that doesn’t break.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com