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Sure they may have to fiddle with the dependency tree, but Node & Go both have well defined dependency formats (go.mod, package.json). It should be relatively easy to record the go.mod/package.json when these applications are built, and issue mass dependency bump & rebuilds if some security issue comes up.

Really seems like the best of both worlds, and less work than trying to wrangle the entire set of node/go deps & a selection of versions into the Debian repos. I mean Debian apparently has ~160,000 packages, while npm alone has over 1,000,000!



> mass dependency bump

That’s not an option for Debian stable. They intentionally backport security and stability patches, and avoid other changes that might break prod without a really good reason.

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/choosing.en.ht...


The situation with backporting security fixes is still the same. Debian could backport the fix to any node/go lib the same way they backport security fixes to C libs.

The only difference is that a backported fix in a language that uses vendored dependencies rather than .so's needs to have all depending packages rebuilt.


Debian Developer here. Backporting fixes to tenths of thousands of packages is already a huge amount of (thankless) work.

But it's still done - as long as there's usually one version of a given library in the whole archive.

Imagine doing that for e.g. 5 versions of a given library, embedded in the sources of 30 different packages.


I'm sorry to hear that it's thankless. Thank you for doing it. It is one of the pillars of my sanity, and I am not exaggerating.




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