go-licenses VS addlicense

> I don't think the exact URL is the problem, it is the fact that it is so easy to include dependencies from external repository that is the problem. In Rust every non-trivial library pulls in 10s or even 100s of dependencies.

But it's also quite a lot easier to audit those dependencies, even automatically (incidentally, GitHub provides dependency scanning for free for many languages).

> Then there is the issue of licencing - how to verify that I am not using some library in violation of its licence and what happens if the licence changes down the road and I don't notice it because I am implicitly using 500 dependencies due to my 3 main libraries?

This is also an automated task. For example, https://github.com/google/go-licenses

> go-licenses analyzes the dependency tree of a Go package/binary. It can output a report on the libraries used and under what license they can be used. It can also collect all of the license documents, copyright notices and source code into a directory in order to comply with license terms on redistribution.

> Rust and Go have solved memory safety compared to C and C++ but have introduced dependency hell of yet unknown proportions.

I mean, it's been a decade and things seem to be going pretty well. Also, I don't think anyone who has actually used these languages seriously has ever characterized their dependency management as "dependency hell"; however, lots of people talk about the "dependency hell" of managing C and C++ dependencies.

> Python and other dynamically typed languages are in a league of their own in that on top of the dependency hell they also do not provide compiler checks that would allow user to see the problem before the exact conditions occur at runtime.

I won't argue with you there.

This is where license header adding tools come in handy. One commonly used tool is the addlicense project under the 'google' organization. 'addlicense' allows you to add license statements to specified files via command-line interaction. However, 'addlicense' has limited functionality; it only adds license headers to files. Some issues raised for 'addlicense' include: