Proposal: redundant dependency detector

[isc-bsherman]

I've got a simple recursive tool that looks at a module's extended (transitive) dependencies and tries to detect whether any of its declared dependencies are redundant. It might make sense to add as a tool, or maybe part of the "test" phase. What do you think?

[isc-dchui]

@isc-bsherman I'm trying to understand the use case. Could you explain and provide an example of what a redundant dependency would be?

[isc-dchui]

Ok I see, thank you. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but it seems to me in this case it matters whether C is a "true" dependency of A or not. As in, if Module A directly relies on functionality in Module C and not indirectly through Module B, then it is just coincidental that Module B also relies on Module C. In this case, I'd be inclined to leave it, although this seems more philosophical and I'm not fully aware of established best practice here.

The idea that the tool is detecting POSSIBLE redundancies and leaving it to the developer is one I very much agree with though. I almost wonder if we could go a step further and detect if a module is actually using a listed dependency, throwing a warning if it is not, a la Cargo for Rust packages, but this seems like a harder problem.

[isc-bsherman]

@isc-dchui it's been a week since your comment. Do we need to discuss further, are we waiting for other people to comment, or ...?

[isc-dchui]

@isc-bsherman Ah sorry I was out of office last week. I'm looking for other people's thoughts on it so I'll bring it up in the weekly internal IPM meeting.

[isc-dchui]

@isc-bsherman Ok the conclusion was that this would be nice to have when coupled with a static code checker that determines whether listed dependencies are actually being used in the code. Where does your tool live currently?

[isc-bsherman]

@isc-dchui shelved in change list 8822031 for safe keeping, as a custom class in my USER namespace