'Auditing all your code' isn't the same as looking up the changes for a certain version on its github release page or a changelog page (if it has one).

It's not the responsibility of OSS maintainer to ensure your software still functions after an upgrade if you're not even willing to spend a modicum of effort to hold up your own end of that bargain. This isn't a big ask, it's why there are changelogs and release notes in the first place; they make it so you don't have to audit the code every time the version changes.

If you're not willing to do that and want unattended upgrades for all dependencies, then this is where the 'no warranty' aspect of that OSS license comes in.

>It's not the responsibility of OSS maintainer

The OSS maintainer has no responsibilities at all so you are right. But if anyone was to blame, it's certainly the library. It's outrageous to radically change a function while keeping the name the same. Because of exactly this issue. If they renamed it you would get an exception which is much nicer.

Seriously? It's eminently reasonable to expect you to know the code you're deploying. Perhaps you're a JS developer. I agree it's incredibly difficult to keep up with the churn there, but in my Elixir deps, the updates tend to be less frequent and more reviewable.

Some deps you can trust the owner and just carefully review the change log. Even that would have caught this issue, though I'm not sure I'd count this gem as trustworthy.

I'm not a JS developer, I'm just someone who has shipped enough software to know that the fraction of people reading change logs is vanishingly small.

Maybe you are a very careful developer, but the vast majority out there is not.

Shipping an udate that will corrupt data if you don't read the changelog is very very dangerous.

I see why they did it. Having a method with the same name as in Active Record but with different behavior is also dangerous.

But they really could have handled this better.

I'd say that updating any version of anything, without reading the changelog, is irresponsible. Why are you updating a gem if you have no idea what has changed?

In other programming environments people do this without issue routinely.

I used to do this, especially with patch releases. Just bump the version and hope the build passes. My mindset has gradually shifted over time though.

These days, it's more a case of updating one thing at a time, and doing the research up front to see what I'm gaining from it or if I might as well stay on the current version. No point updating for the sake of it.

That's 5-10 minutes of up-front, preventative effort that might otherwise become hours of reactive firefighting, and as much time spent on damage control, if it got into production unchecked.

The NPM mindset.