Werkzeug ... and who is responsible for code stability?

Don't you love it when you haven't deployed for a few days, and you change something insignificant, and then your deployed app crashes, because of something far outside your purview?

The python Werkzeug WSGI library was just updated to 3.0. This caused Python Flask 2.2.2 web apps running on Google Cloud's App Engine to automatically update. Which, if you use one of the utilities, url_quote, you get this error:

ImportError: cannot import name 'url_quote' from 'werkzeug.urls'

So, yes, I might have caught this by updating and running it first in my local environment. But Google Cloud could have caught this too, creating a stable environment for incremental deployment.

The fix is to add this line to your requirements.txt file:

werkzeug==2.2.2

This reminds me of the whole unnecessary forced move to Flask, with its mixed bag of improvements and problems. It should be possible to run a webapp of any age (at least with configurations since 2008) in Google App Engine. Why all the unnecessary updating, crashing, and subsequent compulsory code obsolescence? What happened to backwards compatability? If it was still an observed principle, it would be easier now than ever. Why the insistence on forcing programmers to chase after the latest thing?