trouble with dependent repos

[Eric Snow]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 9:32 PM, Nate Finch <nate.finch at canonical.com> wrote:
> Last week, I had trouble landing code in gopkg.in/juju/charm.v6-unstable,

I had a similar experience last week with backward-incompatible
changes in the utils repo. :(

> and using that code from master of github.com/juju/juju.  I was hoping
> someone could help me figure out a way to avoid problems I've encountered.
>
> [snip]
>
> Anyone have ideas on how can we prevent incompatible changes landing in a
> dependent repo without the corresponding fixes landing in juju soon
> thereafter?

I'd recommend avoiding backward-incompatible changes if at all
possible.  Often the temptation is to "fix" some signature while
you're working on related code.  Sometimes you really need a different
signature.  Either way, almost every time you can instead introduce a
new function with the new signature and deprecate the old one.  Using
that approach you do not break backward compatibility and thus do not
cause the problem for dependent repos that you've described.

-eric