[Themaintainers] [EXTERNAL] Re: XKCD comic on maintenance

[Edward Summers]

Thanks Don--I would appreciate an invite to your project so we can discuss GitHub arcana more on there.

When noodling around with the GraphQL API I happened to notice that the GitHub web interface does let you view what projects depend on a given project, aka "dependents" … at least for some projects.

For example here are the GitHub repositories that depend on the Python requests library:

  https://github.com/psf/requests/network/dependents

//Ed

> On Aug 19, 2020, at 4:11 PM, Don Goodman-Wilson <don at maintainerati.org> wrote:
> 
> You’ll enjoy knowing that GH is already parsing dependency files for a wide range of languages and makes that data available over their Dependency Graph API. It’s got some curious bugs and caveats, and of course it only really documents what’s on GitHub as you mentioned, but it’s still pretty useful. I’ve got some code for exploring the full dependency tree for a given project, but it takes hours to pull down everything, but it is useful for discovering distant, and sometimes surprising dependencies. It still doesn’t solve the main problem I raised earlier tho: uncovering even a subset of those packages that depend upon Package X would take ridiculous amounts of resources and a lot of manual intervention.

Nice! 
> 
> Still if you’re interested I can invite you (or anyone else!) to the repo so you can try it out yourself.