What is the best way to raise awareness of a extension upgrade that breaks core fuctionality, e.g. all the menus went away?

Question

On Friday one of the extensions, summaryfields popped up showing there is an upgrade available. Well, for many, this upgrade causes all the civi menus to go away. So while people should never ever apply an upgrade to production without first doing it a test environment, it happens and they are left scrambling to resolve it, (disable the extension).

I'm pretty sure the folks who released the upgrade tested it and it worked in their environment, but apparently something got missed.

The question is when something like this happens what's the best way to alert people not apply this upgrade? Is there a way to "unpromote" it?

(An issue was raised in github for this last Friday.)

Answer 1

I'd like to build out more infrastructure for this.

I've started an Extension Compatibility List which so far has the ability to blacklist an obsolete extension (my original use-case was for merging an extension into core), but it could be extended to blacklist a version of an extension with known bugs or security flaws.

Answer 2

Maybe a blog post / mailing list announcement? I've seen this type of thing happen before both with civi and elsewhere, and there's been a blog post / mailing list announcement made. Here's one example: https://civicrm.org/blog/dave-greenberg/do-not-use-v42x-upgrades-using-drush-possible-data-loss