Git Deps for Clojure

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So Clojure’s deps tool is getting support for pulling deps from Git and using commit SHA or tag name to stick with a specific version.

{:deps
 {org.clojure/data.csv
  {:git/url "https://github.com/clojure/data.csv.git"
   :rev "e5becca"}}}

There’s an interesting discussion going on at the moment on Reddit with Rich Hickey. I found interesting @Yogthos’s concerns about potential drawbacks of this approach (Git repos are not safe/mutable). What do you think about all of this?

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This is big. Easily using git dependencies were one of the big things missing for me in the Clojure universe. After being used to them from Ruby/Bundler and Elixir/mix, having to go through a release ceremony (possibly having to understand SNAPSHOTs) and hosting the artifacts in a repository to just use a fork of dependency with a bugfix seemed outlandish.

To quote Rich Hickey from the afore linked discussion:

I think this is a superior system with substantial benefits. […] We’ve been using this internally and it’s game-changing.

It should make it a lot easier to fork a dependency, improve it, and contribute back those improvements. I do believe the Clojure community will do a good job with this.

8 Likes
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I had not thought of this use case for gitdeps… Wonderful idea !

4

We use this alot so I am quite keen to see gitdeps in action, just to save the song and dance.

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I’m super excited about this. It sounds insane, but I’m working on something that reads deps.edn and forks github repos and then replaces your deps with the forked versions. That way I can be in total control of when something changes.

2 Likes
6

I like this function, but dislike the implementation.
Currently, deps info is maintained in a map config. I prefer it can be like boot: everything is code.
As I prefer explicit-over-implicit.

7

Could you elaborate on why code-over-data is explicit-over-implicit for you?

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