We have this at my work, need to totally gut the main product offering in order to maintain long term viability but nobody will do it because it's the cash cow even though it's slowly dying.
This is a strawman. You're extending their argument to an extreme so it sounds silly when it's not what has been proposed.
The argument is clearly to keep direct dependencies required for building in source control so that if you have a working build system, you can build the software indefinitely and independently from the internet.
Build systems and operating systems don't disappear overnight. Leftpad does.
Well, I wasn't trying to mock them or disagree, although I can see how it might have sounded that way.
What I am trying to do is point out that you can't just say "everything" without defining what that means and knowing why. Maybe you need less or maybe you need more. IMHO, you should do it by looking for places that might be stable and then (consciously) choosing one that meets your needs.
I've actually been in a situation where our source, all the libraries in our build, and the toolchain were not enough. It turned out that one of the libraries we used was itself dependent on another library, a certain dynamic library (which I'll call libfoo.so) included in the Linux install. We got new hardware, but it would not boot the same version of that Linux distro, probably due to lack of drivers. It would boot a newer version of the same Linux distro, but that included libfoo-v2.so, not libfoo.so. Since libfoo-v2.so was a different major version with breaking API changes, our project wouldn't compile.
