Gary Hockin has a new post to his site talking about how he's found that less is more when it comes to what to include in your "composer.json". He works through some of his own opinions on the matter and suggests a bit more thought before just including another library.

I have absolutely no doubt this post will be largely disagreed upon by many in the PHP community, but I’ve had a terrible day and I’m hoping that the process of just getting this off my chest will be therapeutic in some way. [...] So, today I sat down and started writing the tests for our new lightweight SDK that offsets much of the work needed in the delivery of the adverts to workers via a Beanstalk queue. It should have been so easy. Things went well for the early part until I realised that I wanted to be able to extract and serialise our Device object to put it into the queue, and then hydrate it back into a Device object inside the worker

He assumed that since he'd used Zend Framework 2 a good bit and there were no (declared) dependencies, he could directly use an individual component. Unfortunately, there was a dependency (ZendFilterChain), requiring another package to be added via Composer and pulled down. He points out that Composer has made this almost too easy and developers maybe aren't as thoughtful about the libraries they pull in because of it.

He makes a call out to developers to remember the idea behind the MicroPHP Manifesto and really think about the code they're puling in, how large it is and if it's what they really need. He's not suggesting that Composer is the problem, rather the blind usage of it without thinking through the implications.