Dealing With Embarrassing Breaking Changes
Recently I was contracted to bring a Rails 2.3 app up to Rails 3.1, and by far the largest chunk of time was spent on patching or replacing abandoned 3rd-party dependencies. I get embarrassed for our community when I have only two options to recommend for upgrading code: expensive changes or stay on an old version. Here I tell the story of my embarrassment, and recommend encapsulating those dependencies as a means to keep the upgrade demons away.
Comments
And that’s why you should not use a lot of 3rd party plugins.
Tiger’s argument in both valid and invalid. I think it is invalid to say you shouldn’t use a lot of 3rd party gems. Use as many as necessary so that you don’t fall victim of NIH disease. That said, you should consider the viability of the projects you are choosing to rely on. If they lack activity and active members contributin on github then you should be leery of using them in the first place.
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