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by post_break 1188 days ago
Imagine if Cisco or Juniper decided to swap master or remove slave from their code. Core routers going down because of word police terminology and an admin who missed it in the change log.
1 comments

Sounds more like admins need to read over change logs better and properly test updates on dev environments before just blindly updating systems. Features get deprecated, APIs update, crypto algorithms get dropped, it's entirely on the admin to ensure an update will actually work with existing code and systems.

On a very critical system, I wanted to use a newer python module that fixed a very annoying bug in the much older version we were running. Of course the module required a much newer version of python too. I upgraded everything and found that a function in a built-in module I had been using was entirely deprecated, very bad since it was used all over my code. I ended up writing my own module to overload the deprecated function into the new proper way of doing what I needed with only a simple change to my import statements. If I had just properly read over change logs and ran the update on a dev system, I wouldn't have any downtime since I could have made a fix early.