[oblio]

Jenkins is incredibly popular and has a huge community. Dropping backwards compatibility would be very harmful.

What they did instead was to move most of the core functionality in plugins maintained by the core contributors, so they're plugins all but in name. I.e. they can be installed separately, uninstalled, etc., but about 100 plugins are supposed to be used together and you see them frequently in examples, docs, etc.

[mtalantikite]

Plenty of systems can and do evolve their community forward with it. The sentiment of backwards compatibility at all costs is the same that leads you down the road of having to support IE 7. No one is saying play fast and loose with core functionality, but do it responsibly and with community input.

That "about 100 plugins are supposed to be used together" is indicative of bad design to me.

They really should be taking a look at modern systems like Concourse CI to see what they can do to improve.