It would be interesting to extend this project where opt-in folks submit a "telemetry of diffs," to track how certain dependencies needed to be extended, adapted, or patched; those special cases would be incorporated as future features and new regression tests.

Someday, packages may just be "utility-shaped holes" in which are filled in and published on the fly. Package adoption could come from 80/20 agents [1] exploring these edges (security notwithstanding).

However, as long as new packages inherit dependencies according to a human author's whims, that "voting" cycle has not yet been replaced.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47472694

Fantastic write up!

And we're seeing rust happily going down the same path, especially with the micro packages.