Item — HN Reader

And what happens when you need to update those dependencies?

Software is a living beast, you can't keep it alive on 4yr-old dependencies. In fact, you've cursed it with unpatched bugs and security issues.

Yes, keep a separate repo, but also keep it updated. The best approach is to maintain a lag between your packages and upstream so issues like these are hopefully detected & corrected before you update.

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> And what happens when you need to update those dependencies?

Then you update them just like you do otherwise, like I already said is possible.

> you can't keep it alive on 4yr-old dependencies. In fact, you've cursed it with unpatched bugs and security issues

This is misdirection. No one is arguing for the bad thing you're trying to bring up.

Commit your dependencies.

Let's say that the day you update your dependencies is after this malware was injected but before it was noticed.

Now you have malware in your local repo :(

Having a local repo does not prevent malware. Your exposure to risk is less because you update your dependencies less frequently, but the risk still exists and needs to be managed. There's no silver bullet.

This is more misdirection. By no means am I arguing that if you're doing a thousand stupid things and then start checking in a copy of your dependencies, that you're magically good. _Yes_ you're still gonna need to sort yourself out re the 999 other dumb things.