Validation against deps.dev — 2026-08-19
Our resolver checked against Google's Open Source Insights (api.deps.dev),
which publishes already-resolved dependency graphs for npm, PyPI and Maven.
Script: validate-depsdev.mjs. Raw output:
validation.json.
The point was never to agree. It was to find out where we disagree and why, before any of these numbers goes into a post.
Headline
29 single-root stacks compared. 14 match exactly, 23 within two packages.
That is after correcting one definitional gap that the first run exposed.
What the first run caught
The raw comparison showed our counts running +1 higher almost everywhere: vue 23 vs 22, svelte 20 vs 19, webpack 68 vs 67, axios 30 vs 29, django 3 vs 2, pytest 5 vs 4, jackson 3 vs 2, junit5 9 vs 8, okhttp 5 vs 4, kafka 5 vs 4.
Ten stacks off by exactly one is not noise, it is a definition. We count the
root package as a node in the tree; deps.dev reports the graph without SELF.
Neither is wrong, but a number is meaningless until you say which one you meant.
The comparison now subtracts the roots, and validation.json keeps rawDelta
beside delta so the gap stays visible instead of being tidied away.
Worth stating plainly: that +1 is in every package count published in RESULTS.md and in the repo README. "express resolves to 71 packages" means 70 dependencies plus express itself.
The outliers, and what each one is
| stack | ours | deps.dev | diff | explanation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| log4j-core | 2 | 14 | -13 | log4j-core's POM marks 15 dependencies optional. We skip optional; deps.dev includes them. Verified by counting <optional>true</optional> in the POM. |
| netty-all | 143 | 0 | +142 | Their default version reports an empty graph while the POM we read lists 338 dependency entries with zero optional flags. Unexplained. Do not use netty in any published claim until this is understood. |
| jest | 259 | 323 | -64 | They find more, consistent with including optional and platform-specific edges we drop. |
| eslint | 86 | 68 | +18 | We find more. Not yet explained. |
| httpx | 7 | 1 | +5 | PyPI extras: httpx's core deps are declared in a way we follow and they do not. |
| vertx-web | 33 | 24 | +8 | Maven optional/provided boundary again, in the other direction. |
Everything else lands within two.
What this does and does not license
Safe to publish, because the counts agree with an independent resolver on 23 of 29 stacks and the disagreements are named:
- the drift finding (same manifest, resolved month by month)
- the age-by-depth gradient
- the publisher-account counts, which deps.dev does not compute at all
- the cross-ecosystem comparison, with the caveat below
Not safe to publish as-is:
- any claim resting on netty, until the empty graph is explained
- any exact package count presented without saying whether the root is included
- the log4j and eslint rows, until the optional-dependency boundary is stated in the same sentence as the number
The uncomfortable part
deps.dev already publishes resolved dependency graphs for six ecosystems. So "nobody has counted how many packages express pulls in" is false, and no post from this study should imply it. What deps.dev does not publish is the thing this study is actually about: the same manifest resolved as of past dates, and the count of human accounts able to publish into a tree. Those stay ours.