The modern packager’s security nightmare
This will be a somewhat intemperate response, because as a developer of a significant library I found this quite irritating.<p>If you publish a Python library without pinned dependencies, your code is broken. It happens to work today, but there will come a day when the artifact you have published no longer works. It&#x27;s only a matter of time. The command the user had run before, like &quot;pip install spacy==2.3.5&quot; will no longer work. The user will have to then go to significant trouble to find the set of versions that worked at the time.<p>In short unpinned dependencies mean hopeless bit-rot. It guarantees that your system is a fleeting thing; that you will be unable to today publish an end-to-end set of commands that will work in 2025. This is completely intolerable for practical engineering. In order to fix bugs you may need to go back to prior states of a system and check behaviours. If you can&#x27;t ever go back and load up a previous version, you&#x27;ll get into some extremely difficult problems.<p>Of course the people who are doing the work to actually develop these programs refuse to agree to this. No we will not fucking unpin our dependencies. Yes we will tell you to get lost if you ask us to. If you try to do it yourself, I guess we can&#x27;t stop you, but no we won&#x27;t volunteer our help.<p>It&#x27;s maddening to hear people say things like, &quot;Oh if everyone just used semantic versioning this wouldn&#x27;t be a problem&quot;. Of course this cannot work. _Think about it_. There are innumerable ways two pieces of code can be incompatible. You might have a change that alters the time-complexity for niche inputs, making some call time-out that used to succeed. You might introduce a new default keyword argument that throws off a *kwargs. If you call these things &quot;breaking&quot; changes, you will constantly be increasing the major version. But if you increase the major version every release, what&#x27;s the point of semver! You&#x27;re not actually conveying any information about whether the changes are &quot;breaking&quot;.