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.
One day, we’re all going back to vendoring dependencies.
Maybe at that point it won't be using git either, or maybe it will - who knows.
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.
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?
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.
That sounds like it's inconvenient to me.
And both of those concerns can be addressed by using an internal/private registry that mirrors the packages you need.
But in any event, your original question was to elaborate on why vendoring is inconvenient. Whether or not the benefits are worth the inconvenience is a different question, to which IMHO the answer is "it depends". Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.
How so? Whether a dependency is vendored or not, you still have to update it to integrate a security update to that dependency, don't you? The alternative is to not pin your dependencies, but that is far riskier overall.
> Whether or not the benefits are worth the inconvenience is a different question
I would contend that it is the most important question. :-)
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?
Is this a significant risk in reality? MBPs today come with a minimum of 1TB of storage. Even 5 years ago I think the minimum was 256 GB. This is more than large enough for all but the most massive repositories, even with vendored dependencies. And you can always plug in external SSDs or HDDs or connect to a network server.
> 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?
This is a useful homework assignment. Ask your favorite LLM or consult some respected release engineering books. Also consult your local AppSec and infosec teams.
Consider the possibility that the drive needs to accommodate more than just a single repository?
I have lots of software, entire language toolchains, AI models, Docker images, application volumes, VMs, etc.
And this isn’t a theoretical concern; I have to free up space every few months.
> This is a useful homework assignment. Ask your favorite LLM or consult some respected release engineering books. Also consult your local AppSec and infosec teams.
So there is no advantage scenario that you’re aware of?
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 ↔
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.