[beatgammit]

Sometimes breaking backwards compatibility is necessary. For example, if a function in a standard library has an error case that the initial version ignored (happened in Go), you can't start emitting errors when you used to guarantee that it wouldn't error. Or if there's a fundamental flaw in a function that cannot be fixed without a signature change.

People ignore deprecation warnings, so the best way forward is often to break compatibility.

I agree that breaking compatibility should be avoided, but it shouldn't be completely out of the question. It needs to be frequent enough that your anticipate it, but not so frequent that you lose users. And you should try to have a bridge between old and new versions (e.g. Rust's "editions" seem like a good idea).

[Pfhreak]

Then it should be a major version change, right?

[lugg]

> People ignore deprecation warnings, so the best way forward is often to break compatibility.

People don't ignore deprecation warnings, they vehemently disagree with their existence. Why the fuck are you taking functionality away from me?

Don't like your thing? Make a new one. The old one isn't hurting you. And if it is, make a new one.

> the best way forward is often to break compatibility.

This is NEVER the best way forward, this is some next level idiotic shit.

> I agree that breaking compatibility should be avoided, but it shouldn't be completely out of the question.

Why not? What in your world view makes this OK? I'm using your software because it solves a problem. I'm not using it so you can make more work for me.

If linux can make backwards compat guarantees since 0.1 then so can libraries like leftpad.

> It needs to be frequent enough that your anticipate it, but not so frequent that you lose users.

Jesus christ, if you think of your users like this I don't think you really deserve them. Your users are why your thing exists, be grateful and stop shitting on their needs for stability.

[paulddraper]

> Don't like your thing? Make a new one. The old one isn't hurting you. And if it is, make a new one.

That is literally what a version is.

[lugg]

Yea except you lock your users at an old version, for what?

Are you supporting old versions?

You don't have to break backwards compat to release new stuff.

It takes some serious design flaws to create a situation where you need more than a handful of foo2 and foo can't be augmented with sane defaults for whatever new side effect is created by foo2.

[paulddraper]

Support for the old version comes in minor/patch releases.