[pconf]

Thanks for that! We gave up on chef when one of their version updates failed to work with a prior version, both of which were the OS package defaults. Chef silently failed, no error message, nothing in the docs, nothing even in the source code. Had to do a fair bit of searching to find out why.

When open source projects like chef have nobody interested in even documenting much less testing backwards incompatibilities we move them to the bottom of our to-eval list.

This also illustrates a problem in article's blind enthusiasm for the latest revisions and libraries i.e., it dismisses the headaches this causes end-users, who often don't have staff or budget to fix whatever breaks during an upgrade. That said we are at least talking about python, which has had better release QA and backwards compatibility than perl, ruby or, gasp, php.

[chromatic]

That said we are at least talking about python, which has had better release QA and backwards compatibility than perl....

I'm curious as to your experience here. I've found that Perl has by far the best backwards compatibility and release QA of the major dynamic languages. What did you encounter?

[pconf]

We don't use as much perl as we used to but the last upgrade issue was amavisd-new (a Spamassassin wrapper). Spamassassin has perl version issues every so often as well. NetDNS used to introduce new bugs about every 4th revision but seems to have been stable for the past couple of years. GNUmp3d and many audio libraries have non-perl revision-related, backwards-compatibility issues with some regularity.

[chromatic]

That makes sense. XS components (compiled code which uses the Perl API) don't have binary backwards compatibility between major Perl releases.

[pconf]

The audio library incompatibilities were API changes. Amavisd's issues are not binary either but do seem mostly socket related.