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Comment by nulltrace

15 hours ago

Lockfiles help more than people realize. If you're pinned and not auto-updating deps, a package getting sold and backdoored won't hit you until you actually update.

The scarier case is Dependabot opening a "patch bump" PR that probably gets merged because everyone ignores minor version bumps.

I wish those PRs made by the bot can have a diff of the source code of those upgraded libraries (right in the PR, because even if in theory you could manually hunt down the diffs in the various tags...in practise nobody does it).

I mitigate this using a latest -1 policy or minimum age policy depending upon exactly which dependency we're talking about. Combined with explicit hash pins where possible instead of mutable version tags, it's saved me from a few close calls already... Most notably last year's breach of TJ actions