Dependencies can be more than imports or used binaries about dependency_validator

[jacehensley-wf]

Hmm, that's interesting. I don't see this as an issue because if you are using package c's API through package b you are really just using package b's API. And it would be up to package b to not introduce breaking changes when consuming those API members that it exposes through package c.

[natebosch]

There are definitely multiple ways to view this. If we consider that b's API encompasses everything reachable using type inference it can cause the 'apparent' API to expand very big very fast, and if we ask package authors to consider anything across this entire surface their responsibility I think the number of breaking change version bumps would escalate higher than is useful.

It's also interesting to note that with small tweaks to the code the import to c becomes necessary and we'd suggest adding to the dependency, without meaningfully changing the code.

The following snippets are equivalent:

b.someBMethod().someCMethod();

var c = b.someBMethod();
c.someCMethod();

C c = b.someBMethod();
c.someCMethod();

Only the last requires the import to c. It feels odd to me that adding an explicit type also changes your dependencies.