It happens.
(Without meaning to sound callous to folks who have been reduced to firefighting this week: with sane practices on applying updated libraries to production, it happens to other people.)
(Without meaning to sound callous to folks who have been reduced to firefighting this week: with sane practices on applying updated libraries to production, it happens to other people.)
Just 2 days ago, a new version of authlogic was released that accidentally broke 2.3.5 compatibility. And that's a respected and widely used gem. It happens. Also, many gems are starting to deliberately break rals 2.3 compatibility - their newer versions are rails 3 only. Not to mention that gem authors sometimes deprecate and then obsolete some interfaces. So if you're not fixing your versions yet, and you don't have "sane practices" for updating them, it's time to start.
If you've got sane library management processes, you're pretty much safe, but that's a huge amount of wasted effort - everybody has to figure it out for themselves. Right now, it's downright dangerous relying on upstream gems directly unless you know exactly what you're doing, and a distribution layer would let everyone share a common knowledge about which gem versions go well together.
It would also give a handy insertion point for backporting security fixes, which currently doesn't happen very often.