When is a 'core' library a bad idea?

Posted by Alex Angas on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Alex Angas
Published on 2011-07-18T02:25:54Z Indexed on 2012/11/18 17:23 UTC
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code-reuse

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libraries

When developing software, I often have a centralised 'core' library containing handy code that can be shared and referenced by different projects.

Examples:

a set of functions to manipulate strings
commonly used regular expressions
common deployment code

However some of my colleagues seem to be turning away from this approach. They have concerns such as the maintenance overhead of retesting code used by many projects once a bug is fixed. Now I'm reconsidering when I should be doing this.

What are the issues that make using a 'core' library a bad idea?

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