Version Locking

We have a few lovely workarounds, arrived at through a small measure of blood, sweat, tears, and research, embedded in our cpanfile these days.  Here are my two favorites:

requires 'Email::MIME', '<= 1.928';
    # 1.929+ screws up Content-Type sometimes
requires 'DateTime::Format::Strptime', '<= 1.57';
    # DynamoDB v0.1.16 (current) buggy with rewritten Strptime

Nobody wants to come back and check these, to see if later releases of the packages work again.  (It’s possible I’m the only one who remembers these hacks are here.)

Email::MIME was especially nasty because it only failed sometimes, and now, how do I prove that the fixes (which may have occurred in 1.931 or 1.933) actually solve the problem?  I can’t prove the negative in test, and I can’t trust the package in production.

As for the other fun bug, “DynamoDB v0.1.16” refers to the package whose full name is Net::Amazon::DynamoDB and released on November 6th, 2012.  I think this one was detectable at install/test time, but it was still No Fun.  A lot of work was expended in finding out its dependency changed, and I’m not excited to redo it all to find out if 1.67 (or 1.63) fixed the issues.

Especially since use of Perl was deprecated company-wide, and we want to get it all ported to a new language.

Editor’s Notes: this was another old draft.

Since it was written, we accidentally introduced an updated version of Email::MIME into production, and it still failed.  We fixed the bug that allowed the update to occur; clearly, upstream’s process is broken.  I don’t think we could be the only people hit, across multiple years and multiple versions of the entire software stack.

I’m not entirely sure what happened with Net::Amazon::DynamoDB—but we may have been able to use a newer version with it.