A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

Re:A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subs... by lamontcg on Sunday January 09, 2022 @08:46PM (#29869588)

We do major version bumps on a yearly cycle and people get stuck on 8 year old versions and won't upgrade. Its easy to say that integers are free and limitless, but constant major version upgrades are something that people won't tolerate one way or another either.

And you have to understand that the people making these decisions make dozens of them for every single release, and when they make category mistakes that is how you get breaking changes released early. Every single bug when looked at in isolation looks obvious what should have happened given hindsight bias.

And I just don't think open source software, that isn't corporate backed in one way or another, should ever go 1.0 and it should stay 0.x.y and go ahead and break compat every 3-6 months or so as necessary. The cost of SemVer and trying to get it continuously correct on every single patch is a large tax.

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Re:A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subs... by Xavdidtheshadow on Monday January 10, 2022 @03:12PM (#29881432)

> We do major version bumps on a yearly cycle and people get stuck on 8 year old versions and won't upgrade

We do the same thing and have the exact same experience, unfortunately. Software is a messy business and it's hard to apply strict rules to human process.

I think ultimately SemVer can be used to to accurately communicate if you, a user, are safe to upgrade between versions if applied strictly. Whether or not your users will (or be happy about it) is another ballgame.

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