[c3RlcGhlbnI_]

Yeah, I don't think a name change would have fixed this case. Here you were just wrong. You failed to predict the impact of such a visible change and as such did not implement the change in such a way to minimize impact or use an appropriate migration plan so as to not surprise users.

Sadly the users most likely to be inconvenienced by a change like that are also those with the least knowledge of the product(like if you don't know what babel actually does, you aren't going to understand why the cli stopped working or why you need this new config file to make it do something). That leaves them frustrated and angry but with a poor understanding of why and what adequate solutions would be. There is nothing you can do about that, asking the community to be nice isn't going to help because most of your users don't think they are even in a community.

The only things you can do are try to anticipate them a bit, and to try and count the criticisms but ignore their contents(and search yourself for the deeper cause). Luckily the first part is sort of easy for JS projects because most of the active tooling development in JS is on things that have been done many times before. In this case you could have just looked to gcc and wondered for a bit why they still ship with --std=gnu90 by default, despite how maddening that must be for all the developers working on new features that go underused as a result. You could have looked at all of the other software that is stuck dragging forward dumb configuration systems with complicated defaults and layers of precedence instead of just asking users to fill in a few config fields on first run.

So I do want to say that I am so sorry on behalf of your users, and I really appreciate the work that you do. However that was a real mistake with babel and a big part of improving the interaction between you and your users unfortunately falls on you.

[pfranz]

This is what makes open source (and a lot of volunteering) really difficult. If you look at a sibling post, one reason given was, "Just tried to use hyperbole to bust the Javascript echo chamber." I think that's true for many of the egregious examples, but it still hurts and isn't fair the people working on the project.

The lines get blurry, XP has a business case for dropping support, Google (and GNU) are decently funded I imagine. I'm not sure how much his work at Facebook and his contribution to open source overlap, but it's not fair to be outraged or make demands if you're not paying anything--especially if this is all work done own his own, for fun.

Hell, I work in an industry where we pay for expensive software but don't have a venue to complain about bugs or feature changes because they don't make themselves accessible. We could pay 10x more money and get a support contract where we can yell at them, I've worked at places that do, and they likely won't address your issues. Pay 100x more and they'll write a custom version for you. With OSS, many times, we get this for free.

[tracker1]

the cli only stopped working the same on new projects with v6, old projects should have continued to work... though a post-install that created a default .babelrc would have been nice.