Dependency Hell

Published on Jul 31, 2022 • #tips

Abstract

This is where things get a scary turn! In this article, we are going to talk about a real concern that many maintainers and developers from the past decades were worried about. This topic does not rely on any specific framework, programming language, etc. Since our products need some requirements in order to work efficiently and we (developers) hate to waste our time on nothing, we need to think about this BIG issue.

We all know that our projects whether it's a mobile application software or a Python program that interacts with an API, need some necessities to be working fine. Those necessities are called "Dependencies" in our world.

I'm pretty sure that you've already been in some situations where you needed to install some packages in order to be able to work with some functionalities and implementations. Most of the time, you simply use a package manager and install your required packages. Each installed package may need some other modules and packages to provide you the facilities and so on.

Now, imagine your project getting bigger and bigger. As it grows and you add new features, it requires more dependencies and modules. We can shape the dependencies into a graph-like illustration that shows the actual application dependencies and the required packages by dependencies.