Posted by memalign 16 hours ago
I've been using it so long, I forgot that it is not official.
Half the fun of this xkcd is referring to it in context of whatever just went haywire.
That text is literally the only thing hardcoded. It's inside a PNG, sourced in.
I get it though. Reproducing that cutesy "hand drawn" text would be a pain in the arse if you didn't just have the font.[1]
[1] https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-fontYou'd first need to figure out a way to generate a complete dependency tree. For each box, I interpret its height as a measure of its complexity and its width as a measure of the support it receives. The hardest part would probably be figuring out a way to quantitatively measure those values.
I don't know if the "The Nebraska Guy Ranking" this project uses is very useful, though. In particular the "depth" criteria doesn't make much sense to me, since it assumes the more foundational a dependency is, the more robust it must be. This seems to run counter to the point of the original comic where the "Nebraska Guy" piece was the fragile block holding up the entire tower.
This project also doesn't attempt to measure or visualize the complexity of a project. Theoretically a more complex project would require more support than a simple one, so I think that's an important metric to capture.
I’m changing this ASAP to least-privilege and I’ll publish a clear explanation of scopes + data handling. In the meantime: please run the local/CLI path if you want zero-trust.