Monday, August 18, 2008

Dependencies versus effort

I do not need to rehash the benefits of relying on other libraries when developing a library here. If you care about dependencies, you ought to be familiar with those benefits already.

I wish to instead address the common complaint of "too many dependencies" from those who feel that getting a Common Lisp library installed is too difficult.

Here is how I feel about such requests:

Graph 1

In short, the effort avoiding a dependency, even in the case of synchronizing with an external source, far exceeds that for the simple process of fetching a dependency yourself and adding it to your ASDF registry. What's good for the maintainer is good for the library.

To clarify further:

Graph 2

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