Comment by jerf

I fought off the local imposition of Dependabot by executive fiat about a year ago by pointing out that it maximizes vulnerabilities to supply chain attacks if blindly followed or used as a metric excessively stupidly. Maximizing vulnerabilities was not the goal, after all. You do not want to harass teams with the fact that DeeplyNestedDepen just went from 1.1.54-rc2 to 1.1.54-rc3 because the worst case is that they upgrade just to shut the bot up.

I think I wouldn't object to "Dependabot on a 2-week delay" as something that at least flags. However working in Go more than anything else it was often the case even so that dependency alerts were just an annoyance if they aren't tied to a security issue or something. Dynamic languages and static languages do not have the same risk profiles at all. The idea that some people have that all dependencies are super vital to update all the time and the casual expectation of a constant stream of vital security updates is not a general characteristic of programming, it is a specific characteristic not just of certain languages but arguably the community attached to those languages.

(What we really need is capabilities, even at a very gross level, so we can all notice that the supposed vector math library suddenly at version 1.43.2 wants to add network access, disk reading, command execution, and cryptography to the set of things it wants to do, which would raise all sorts of eyebrows immediately, even perhaps in an automated fashion. But that's a separate discussion.)