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   Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 22:27:15 JST Rich Felker

   @hipsterelectron I think you're vastly under appreciating that doing this would be rigorously specifying the *complete* contract of the dependency, or at least the parts you want to depend on. Which is in some sense equivalent to implementing it yourself in an idealized high level language.

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 22:29:29 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @hipsterelectron Imagine having the full text of POSIX, but written in a rigorous manner with all ambiguities and contradictions fixed, embedded in your package file. 😲 Repeat for every third party dep that didn't even have a halfway decent contract specification to begin with. 😫

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 22:32:38 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @hipsterelectron It'd get old really quick repeating that in every package. So you could have libraries of such specifications. And write dependencies on those libraries. Using a rigorous language to express what qualities the specifications you're depending on need to have, rather than referencing them by name...

     What's that? Wha..? Oh. Oh. Oh....

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     JP (froztbyte@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 22:54:02 JST JP

     in reply to

     @dalias @hipsterelectron so there's an idea I've been playing around with for a while (and need to write up)

     why _not_ do exactly that?

     we have /.well-known/{xxx} for so many things

     let's shove more things in there (or whatever non-http contract boundary an application has). let's make inter-dependencies _explicitly defined_ instead of some shit you derive from readmes and CM systems - fairly doable for application builds/artefacts too, imo

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 22:54:02 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • JP

     @froztbyte @hipsterelectron Writing formal specs is hard and ppl are bad at it.

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 23:05:54 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • JP

     @froztbyte @hipsterelectron You can't automate generation of contract from implementation.

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     JP (froztbyte@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 23:05:55 JST JP

     in reply to

     @dalias @hipsterelectron to be clear, I'm not advocating that this should be human gruntwork

     I envision this as "batteries included", in toolchains and runtimes. using it and having it should be as close to free as possible. sure it'd imply a _lot_ of work to get it there, but I think it'd be worth it

     (it _is_ on my list of ideas to sketch up in detail, and might get to it soon)