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Comment by po1nt | Hacker News Reader

It's not about unexpected changes. It's about DX in git CLI. You don't want to see massive diffs that are basically unreadable for humans, you just want to see that the file changed.

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> you just want to see that the file changed

I check the diff for uv.lock (Python counterpart of package-lock.json) every time I merge a PR. It is important to know which direct or transient dependencies have been updated. We don't blindly bump all dependencies to the latest versions (you shouldn't either).

Python packages aren't quite so insane on transitive dependencies. The diff of package-lock.json can be novel length.

write your requirement.txt files via

    pipdeptree --freeze

to see this clearly

FYI the uv equivalent is

    uv pip tree

not interested, really

same - I check the changelog for every major (== minor if v0) and some minor version changes in most of my projects, including at work. I've caught quite a lot of would-have-broken-something changes, and opportunities for fixes/optimizations/etc by doing so. and sometimes they mention fixing a bug we didn't know we had, so we learned about it early before it corrupted too much data.

It's nice to have that luxury, we just don't have the manpower to devote to that. Major versions sure, otherwise it's just update and run test-suite and some smoke tests.

it helps a lot if you make an effort to keep your dependency tree relatively small

We are talking about npm here... Any framework like React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, etc. is going to pull in hundreds or thousands of packages. I just checked one of the smallest web projects I have (5 dependencies, no framework) and it has 265 packages In package-lock.json. My personal website (vite + nuxt) has 1171.

But it's not always massive, it's a good practice to see what the diff is and ensure there is no weird dependency (aka supply chain attack) showing up in there.

In my opinion you have no chance of identifying supply chain attack like this. It's not like you will see "evil-package": "*" in there. Supply chain attacks happen by appending obfuscated code deep into dependency no one knew you had in the first place.

It's a CLI. DX is not the only concern. What about scripts that expect the default git behavior?

You could argue "those scripts are dumb then! outta my way!", but then you shouldn't be using a CLI for whatever it is you're trying to do. If you insist, you can just grep or use the --stat option.

We already know the git CLI has plenty of antifeatures like this. It is up to the devs how they want to proceed, but it doesn't change the fact that hiding things is a footgun.

You can suppress the git attribute system if you need default settings. I wouldn't call it "antifeature" but customizability as git was always supposed to be used with CLI, this is just a way to make output less verbose.

If your diffs are too large to review your project structure needs change. I go by the broad statement that EVERY line should be read, understood and explainable by the developer.

For critical files like package-lock.json I'd also expect developers to explain why a library was added or a version was changed and the impact of the version change. The lack of such basic hygiene is why supply chain attacks are so common these days.

Are you saying "as a developer, you don't want to see what code you ship as transitive dependencies"?

I guess it's the norm in the software industry, but that's slightly irresponsible.

It’s too much code. Maybe companies are able to handle this, but as a solo dev it’s completely infeasible.

I could just not use those deps, but then I won’t be able to build anything interesting. The software industry has historically relied on being a high-trust society; I don’t know what will happen if that is changing.

Rewriting every dep with Fable for every project, maybe.

There is a big difference between completely YOLOing your dependencies and deeply reviewing all their code. It is a gradient, by acknowledging that you ask git to hide the file because you consider it "noise", you say that you are on the YOLO far end of the spectrum.

Every dependency adds risk, the goal is to minimise them. If you include a dependency for something that you would code in 20 lines, you should at least wonder if it's worth it or not. If that dependency pulls 5 transitive dependencies itself, probably you should go for the 20 lines.

As you say, sometimes it's impossible to track because there are so many dependencies (thanks to modern package managers that make it so easy). But at least you should see that your dependencies are completely out of control. If you ship an app where 95% of the code comes from dependencies you have never seen, you may as well have vibe-coded the app.

> The software industry has historically relied on being a high-trust society; I don’t know what will happen if that is changing.

I very much disagree with that. Most software is bad and shouldn't be trusted.

You know what’s bad DX? Your company’s product having a massive security breach, people stop using it, and having to lay off all the software engineers

DX = ? Developer experience maybe?

Yes

The point is that it should not be massive.

Tell that to the NPM folks.

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