I re-learned a valuable lesson this afternoon . I was working on fixing a pesky problem in the system. After trying a few obvious things, I did what smart developers do and look for documentation; chances are, unless you’re really on the bleeding edge (and I’m not), that someone, somewhere has whined about it on a message board. In this case, I found the fix I was looking for, which in this case consisted of upgrading a particular Perl module. Install module, problem solved.

Literally minutes after I pat myself on the back for a job well done, things start breaking. Turns out that the new version of the module fixed the bug, but in return broke practically everything else. Whoops! Abort! Uninstall! After mopping up and reopening my poor bug, I did a bit more research and found out that a lot of other people had whined about this as well, but I didn’t look further into it than the immediate fix. The moral for today: look beyond the horizon of the fix and check to see what havoc the fix might cause — it doesn’t happen often, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.