posted by delano

Earlier today I updated the net-ssh family of Ruby gems and I broke one of the rules of semantic versioning.

Specifically, rule #8:

8. Minor version Y (x.Y.z | x > 0) MUST be incremented if new,
backwards compatible functionality is introduced to the public API.

I broke Chef. I broke Vagrant. net-ssh is pretty far upstream so in just a couple hours there were over 52,000 installs of the offending gems, much to the chagrin of sysadmins and devops folks everywhere.

Note: If you have any of the following gems installed on your system, you should remove them: net-ssh-gateway-1.1.1, net-ssh-gateway-1.1.2, net-ssh-multi-1.1.1, net-ssh-multi-1.1.2, net-scp-1.0.5, and net-scp-1.0.6. See my previous post.

The err of my ways

I released three gems with the PATCH incremented instead of the MINOR version number. This makes a huge difference downstream because of the “twiddle-wakka”:

# Meanwhile, in chef.gemspec
s.add_dependency "net-ssh", "~> 2.2.2"
s.add_dependency "net-ssh-multi", "~> 1.1.0"

The ~> will fuzzily match any gems less than 1.2 but greater than or equal to 1.1.0. This feature strikes a balance between ">= 1.1.0" (which is too loose) and "= 1.1.0" (which is too strict). The problem is that net-ssh-multi-1.1.2 changed the net-ssh dependency to 2.6.5 which made Chef uninstallable due to the conflict between chef.gemspec and net-ssh-multi.gemspec (2.2.x vs 2.6.5). Feels bad man.

So if I ruined your day, send me your email, Twitter, Skype, or phone number and I will reply with a personal apology.

(Offer expires Feb 12th at 07:59 UTC).

On a more positive note

A big thank you to everyone who emailed, tweeted, and opened issues to help get this resolved quickly. Although regrettable, this is the only significant issue with net-ssh and friends in the 4 years (and 18M downloads) that I’ve been maintaining them. I feel pretty good about that.

Incidentally, I updated the THANKS.txt that’s part of every net-ssh release today too. I added the names of all the people who contributed code since I’ve been maintaining it. Here they are:

• GOTOU Yuuzou
• Guillaume Marçais
• Daniel Berger
• Chris Andrews
• Lee Jensen
• Hiroshi Nakamura
• Andreas Wolff
• mhuffnagle
• ohrite
• iltempo
• nagachika
• Nobuhiro IMAI
• arturaz
• dubspeed
• Andy Brody
• Marco Sandrini
• Ryosuke Yamazaki
• muffl0n
• pcn
• musybite
• Mark Imbriaco
• Joel Watson
• Woon Jung
• Edmund Haselwanter
• robbebob
• Daniel Pittman
• Markus Roberts
• Gavin Brock
• Rich Lane
• Lee Marlow
• xbaldauf
• Delano Mandelbaum
• Miklós Fazekas
• Andy Lo-A-Foe
• Jason Weathered
• Hans de Graaff
• Travis Reeder
• Akinori MUSHA
• Alex Peuchert
• Daniel Azuma
• Will Bryant
• Gerald Talton
• ckoehler
• Karl Varga
• Denis Bernard
• Steven Hazel
• Alex Holems
• Andrew Babkin
• Bob Cotton
• Yanko Ivanov
• Angel N. Sciortino
• arilerner@mac.com
• David Dollar
• Timo Gatsonides
• Matthew Todd
• Brian Candler
• Francis Sullivan
• James Rosen
• Mike Timm
• guns
• devrandom
• kachick
• Pablo Merino
• thedarkone
• czarneckid
• jbarnette
• watsonian
• Grant Hutchins
• Michael Schubert
• mtrudel
• and of course, Jamis Buck.

I know I’m not the only one who appreciates your time and effort. Thank you for making net-ssh better!