Dependency Sisyphus Task

The Sisyphean Task of Keeping Dependencies Updated

Updating dependencies is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge - by the time you finish, it’s time to start over. At Zenoss, we had a dependency that hadn’t been updated in three years because every time we tried, it broke seventeen other things in subtle ways. It was like a Jenga tower where one piece was load-bearing for reasons nobody understood.

The best part is when you update a dependency to fix a security vulnerability, and it introduces three new security vulnerabilities. It’s like fixing a leaky roof by poking new holes so the water has more exit options. Or when a minor version update completely changes the API because the maintainer decided semantic versioning is more of a suggestion than a rule. Version 2.3.1 to 2.3.2 shouldn’t require rewriting half your codebase, but here we are.

My favorite was when we updated a logging library and it started logging our logs, creating an infinite recursion that filled our disk in twelve seconds. The log files just said “Logging: Logging: Logging: Logging:” repeated until the heat death of the universe or disk space ran out, whichever came first. We rolled back so fast we probably traveled backward in time. Now I update dependencies like I’m defusing a bomb - very carefully and with a rollback plan for when it inevitably explodes.