Posts from 2021-06

The dependency hubs in Open Source software

A few days ago, Google announced its experimental project Open Source Insights, which permits the exploration of the dependency graph of Open Source software. My first look at it ended with a disappointment: in its initial stage, the site considers only the package universes of Java, JavaScript, Go, and Rust. That excludes most of the software I know and use, which tends to be written mainly in C, C++, Fortran, and Python. But I do have a package manager that has all the dependency information for most of the software that I care about: Guix. So I set out to do my own exploration of the Guix dependency graph, with a particular focus: identifying the hubs of the Open Source dependency network.

Tags: computational science, computer-aided research, digital scientific notations, emacs, mmtk, mobile computing, polycrisis, programming, proteins, python, rants, reproducible research, science, scientific computing, scientific software, social networks, software, source code repositories, sustainable software

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