No abstract

Background: Third party libraries used by a project (dependencies) can easily become outdated over time, a phenomenon called technical lag. Keeping dependencies up to date induces a significant overhead in terms of the resources (e.g. developer time), but necessary to maintain software quality. Aims: This study provides a large scale analysis of technical lag across the major package managers currently in use. Method: We conducted a mixed-methods study using open-source project data obtained from 14 package managers using the libraries.io dataset. Results: The majority of fixed version declarations, along with a significant number of flexible declarations, are outdated. Fixed declarations are not regularly updated, except in major updates, so they quickly lag. Despite the prevalence of breaking changes in updates, downgrading declarations to earlier versions are rare. Conclusions: Technical lag is prevalent but preventable across package managers -semantic versioning based declaration ranges would remove the majority of lag. Further tooling uptake is also recommended to minimise technical lag.

Tenants’ unions from across Europe met in Barcelona in May 2019 to exchange information, ideas and tactics. They are organizing in the face of housing crises in their home countries and often face similar challenges. The series of workshops looked at how the organizations are structured, how they organize, what their tactics are and how they cope with limited resources. The scale of the challenge facing tenants’ unions across Europe means many organizations are trying to build at scale, and the problems of doing this were discussed extensively. There are plans for the tenants’ unions to meet again.