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Comment by fideloper | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is because I'm not deep into the Ruby world, but I'm not sure I'm understanding the issue with adding/changing dependencies as a project is updated.

(I guess just my opinion? Except semver): Features aren't necessary worthy of a major version bump (backwards compatibility generally is).

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It is being a bit picky in my opinion but the issue is that if this pattern continues deployments could take x longer depending on how long each gem needs to be installed. If the gem isn't required for your app to run why should you wait for it to install? Also in some more secure orgs certain gems need to go through an approval process. If this has become a dependency it could create an impasse as you need to go through all the hoops to update artifact repositories etc.

Those are certainly valid points, and they don't fall on deaf ears. Through a mistake when failing to push to the upstream remote this gem caused exactly that problem for someone yesterday[1]. Fortunately I was able to fix it in a few minutes and get the OP back on track.

[1]: https://github.com/harrowio/capistrano-harrow/issues/1

Right, we'd like to be able to fix bugs in the harrow integration without having to re-release Capistrano. The other gem dependency is a mature, well loved project in it's own right which the maintainer generously offered to maintain as a first-party plugin and we had such great feedback about how much better the output looked with the community formatter, we made it the default.

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