Bullet gem pulls the latest dependency of "Uniform Notifier" which dropped support for Growl.

[granowski-bamboo]

When I was running this app I have at this company I work for, we were doing our typical workflow and came across this:

/-----CENSORED-----/config/environments/development.rb:67:in block (2 levels) in <main>': undefined method growl=' for Bullet:Module (NoMethodError)

Turns out as of about 8 hours ago:

flyerhzm/uniform_notifier@dd6cc19

"drop growl support" was committed to the uniform_notifier library.

When I use version 1.14.2 of uniform_notifier, the app works, the bullet gem is fine.
When I use version 1.16.0 the app startup blows up cause the growl= method is gone.

A simple answer could be to fix the uniform_notifier dependency for bullet.
But it looks like some deprecation is underway, so a new version of bullet probably needs to be released.

We're using bullet gem 6.1.4 in this app I work on.
So I imagine a patch? One that rolls up to the version 7 or something...?

[flyerhzm]

@granowski-bamboo I don't know what patch do you expect, I just updated README to say

Growl support is dropped from uniform_notifier 1.16.0, if you still want it, please use uniform_notifier 1.15.0.

[granowski-bamboo]

A co-worker suggested I open as issue cause the expectation is that usually dependencies are pinned with versions along with semantic versioning expectations.

We didn't expect that the uniform_notifier would drop growl support and break our code (which only references the bullet library directly).

I think we're mostly opening this issue just to let you know that people's ruby apps will break randomly because the uniform_notifier dependency will upgrade itself if the dependency is not locked down to version approximately 1.14.x.

[granowski-bamboo]

bullet/bullet.gemspec

Line 28 in 96e66d1

s.add_runtime_dependency 'uniform_notifier', '~> 1.11'

I imagine that needs to say
s.add_runtime_dependency 'uniform_notifier', '<= 1.14'

And in version 7+'s branch you could have something like
s.add_runtime_dependency 'uniform_notifier', '>= 1.16.0'

[granowski-bamboo]

I honestly don't know what the answer is here, I'm no rubyist expert... rofl.
Feel free to take the suggestion at will, and close the issue.
I think we've raised the awareness that people's code will break when the dependency of the library upgrades automatically.
Typical problem of npm-like and gem library trees.

[jacob-ablowitz]

POSTING THIS FOR ANYONE ELSE WHO RUNS ACROSS THIS PROBLEM:

I don't use uniform_notifier at all, I have bullet included in the :development section of my Gemfile without any versioning constraints:

group :development do
  gem 'brakeman', require: false
  gem 'guard-brakeman'
  gem 'listen', '~> 3'
  gem 'bullet'
  gem 'guard-rspec', require: false
  gem 'spring'
  gem 'spring-commands-rspec'
  gem 'spring-watcher-listen', '~> 2'
end

I just ran bundle update; now my development environment cannot start up due to a NoMethodError with growl:

web      | [454] Puma starting in cluster mode...
web      | [454] * Puma version: 5.6.4 (ruby 2.7.2-p137) ("Birdie's Version")
web      | [454] *  Min threads: 5
web      | [454] *  Max threads: 8
web      | [454] *  Environment: development
web      | [454] *   Master PID: 454
web      | [454] *      Workers: 2
web      | [454] *     Restarts: (✔) hot (✖) phased
web      | [454] * Preloading application
web      | [454] ! Unable to load application: NoMethodError: undefined method `growl=' for Bullet:Module
web      | Traceback (most recent call last):
web      | 	37: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/bin/puma:23:in `<main>'
web      | 	36: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/bin/puma:23:in `load'
web      | 	35: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/puma-5.6.4/bin/puma:10:in `<top (required)>'
web      | 	34: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/puma-5.6.4/lib/puma/cli.rb:81:in `run'
web      | 	33: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/puma-5.6.4/lib/puma/launcher.rb:182:in `run'
web      | 	32: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/puma-5.6.4/lib/puma/cluster.rb:357:in `run'
web      | 	31: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/puma-5.6.4/lib/puma/runner.rb:150:in `load_and_bind'
web      | 	30: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/puma-5.6.4/lib/puma/configuration.rb:270:in `app'
web      | 	29: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/puma-5.6.4/lib/puma/configuration.rb:348:in `load_rackup'
web      | 	28: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/rack-2.2.3/lib/rack/builder.rb:66:in `parse_file'
web      | 	27: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/rack-2.2.3/lib/rack/builder.rb:105:in `load_file'
web      | 	26: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/rack-2.2.3/lib/rack/builder.rb:116:in `new_from_string'
web      | 	25: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/rack-2.2.3/lib/rack/builder.rb:116:in `eval'
web      | 	24: from config.ru:5:in `block in <main>'
web      | 	23: from config.ru:5:in `require_relative'
web      | 	22: from /myapp/config/environment.rb:5:in `<top (required)>'
web      | 	21: from /bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/railties-6.1.5/lib/rails/application.rb:391:in `initialize!'
<snipped out remainder of stack trace given it's not likely relevant>

Rails version 6.1.5

Locking bullet to 6 wasn't enough, as my bundle update had already installed uniform-notifier 1.16.0. I had to explicitly limit versions of both bullet and uniform_notifier in my Gemfile:

...
  gem 'bullet', '~> 6'
  gem 'uniform_notifier', '<= 1.15'
...

After this, I deleted vendor/cache/uniform_notifier-1.16.0.gem and ran bundle update again. After this, my server was able to load and run.

There seems to be something in bullet 7.0.1 that is still referencing growl, @flyerhzm . Hope the above stack trace is helpful in isolating and removing it as appropriate!

[flyerhzm]

@jacob-ablowitz this looks weird, I have removed the growl from both uniform_notifier and bullet.