from Hacker News

Understand Your Dependencies

by dedalus on 4/19/25, 8:52 PM with 7 comments

• by agwa on 4/23/25, 4:09 PM

  deps.dev does an absolutely terrible job with Go dependencies. It thinks modules are the unit of dependency rather than packages. Consequentially, it reports vulnerabilities in packages that are never even imported. For example, https://deps.dev/go/filippo.io%2Fsunlight shows a "9.1 CRITICAL" vulnerability in a supposed SSH dependency from a project that has nothing to do with SSH.

  Google ought to be embarrassed by this, especially when govulncheck <https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/vuln/cmd/govulncheck> exists and actually checks whether vulnerable code is reachable.

• by r1chardnl on 4/23/25, 4:49 PM

  I don't know how well this makes you understand your dependencies. As for C/C++ a lot of people probably depend on stb single header files libraries. There's stb_truetype but it specifically mentions not to use it on any untrusted/outside .ttf files which I do like but you have to keep in mind to bake to bitmaps or only use your own .ttf provided files, thus I would put this dependency in another place like tooling. Is there a way to do this in other languages like JS and NPM? Maybe carefully choosing which dependencies you include is better?

  https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h#L...

• by recursivedoubts on 4/23/25, 3:12 PM

  no dependency is more understandable than the dependency that doesn’t exist

• by simonw on 4/23/25, 6:23 PM

  Surprising that Click https://deps.dev/pypi/click/8.1.8 is listed as "license unknown" - https://pypi.org/project/click/ knows that it's BSD.