I've been maintaining my Build a SAAS App with Flask video course[0] for 8 years. It has gone from Flask pre-1.0 to 2.3 and has been recorded twice with tons of incremental updates added over the years to keep things current.
In my opinion tutorial creators should pin their versions so that anyone taking the course or going through the tutorial will have a working set up that matches the video or written material.
I'm all for keeping things up to date and do update things every few months but expecting anyone can install any version doesn't tend to work well for tutorials because sometimes bumping a minor version requires a code change or covering new concepts. As a tutorial consumer it's frustrating when the content doesn't match the source code unless it's something simple like a version bump.
As a tutorial creator it's your responsibility to ensure things work which ultimately leads to doing everything in your power to remove time as a variable. You can commit a frozen dependency file which locks everything. I sleep pretty well at night knowing things will work tomorrow. Before I did that I had all sorts of things break over the years due to some dependency of a dependency introducing a backwards incompatible change. Now it's predictable and I can control when it's safe to update a set of packages.
I've held off upgrading Flask to 3.0 and Python 3.12 due to these open issues with popular 3rd party packages https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example/issues/17. I'm sure new releases will get pushed in due time. When they are good to go then I'll add a new video update and all is well for everyone. Maintainers can work at their own pace, I can verify everything works in production and then roll it into the course and folks taking the course get an up to date version that's been proven to work.
In my opinion tutorial creators should pin their versions so that anyone taking the course or going through the tutorial will have a working set up that matches the video or written material.
I'm all for keeping things up to date and do update things every few months but expecting anyone can install any version doesn't tend to work well for tutorials because sometimes bumping a minor version requires a code change or covering new concepts. As a tutorial consumer it's frustrating when the content doesn't match the source code unless it's something simple like a version bump.
As a tutorial creator it's your responsibility to ensure things work which ultimately leads to doing everything in your power to remove time as a variable. You can commit a frozen dependency file which locks everything. I sleep pretty well at night knowing things will work tomorrow. Before I did that I had all sorts of things break over the years due to some dependency of a dependency introducing a backwards incompatible change. Now it's predictable and I can control when it's safe to update a set of packages.
I've held off upgrading Flask to 3.0 and Python 3.12 due to these open issues with popular 3rd party packages https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example/issues/17. I'm sure new releases will get pushed in due time. When they are good to go then I'll add a new video update and all is well for everyone. Maintainers can work at their own pace, I can verify everything works in production and then roll it into the course and folks taking the course get an up to date version that's been proven to work.
[0]: https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/