How should we deal with outdated dependencies?

[iblech]

Ethercalc is obviously a terrific and robust piece of software. Lots of people are gaining lots of value from it. :-)

I noticed that the dependencies have not been updated for quite some time now. There has been a pull request, but people felt uneasy merging because of a lack of tests/sufficient testing.

How can we move this forward?

I'd like to spend a bit of time on this. However, I'm not familiar at all with the npm ecosystem, so I couldn't do much more than let npm update bump the version numbers, run ethercalc to see whether it "seems to work" and fix simple problems.

[eddyparkinson]

What kind of help are you looking for?     For npm, maybe look for a tutorial. Videos sometimes help.  On Tuesday, 18 January 2022, 00:25:36 GMT+10:30, Ingo Blechschmidt ***@***.***> wrote: Ethercalc is obviously a terrific and robust piece of software. Lots of people are gaining lots of value from it. :-) I noticed that the dependencies have not been updated for quite some time now. There has been a pull request, but people felt uneasy merging because of a lack of tests/sufficient testing. How can we move this forward? I'd like to spend a bit of time on this. However, I'm not familiar at all with the npm ecosystem, so I couldn't do much more than let npm update bump the version numbers, run ethercalc to see whether it "seems to work" and fix simple problems. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS or Android. You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[iblech]

I guess I'm asking whether a pull request which would bump some of the dependencies would get accepted, even though we don't have a full test suite to check whether everything still works and have to rely on a more informal version of "I ran it locally, everything seemed to work".

[JonasDoe]

Many libraries document their breaking changes, so generally spoken it's recommendable to check out those in the documentation. Speaking from experience, not all breaking changes are obvious and easy to detect.

[eddyparkinson]

@iblech This surprised me, with testing, code reviews and manual testing works better than automated testing. People who get good at testing tend to stop using automated tests because they discover that reviews and manual tests are better. There are exceptions, but generally, reviews and manual tests are better.