Summary

We recently hit an issue when one of our dependencies released a new version that deprecated functions still in use by WiredTiger, causing test failures.
This was resolved in WT-8477 by pinning the dependency to a specific version and should be done for all WiredTiger dependencies.

Motivation

Does this affect any team outside of WT?

No

How likely is it that this use case or problem will occur?

Infrequently/rarely

If the problem does occur, what are the consequences and how severe are they?

WiredTiger has few dependencies, so this is constrained to mostly our test suites.

Is this issue urgent?

No

Acceptance Criteria (Definition of Done)

All dependencies installed via pip install have a specified version, preferably via use of a requirements.txt file.
Any C or C++ dependencies have been investigated and specific versions specified if possible.

Testing

N/A. Done by code inspection

Documentation update

Not required, but the "Tool, compiler and language standard versions" wiki page can be updated.

Suggested Solution

For Python dependencies a single requirements.txt file can be created and called via pip install -r requirements.txt