In my opinion, you should certainly go for 1.0, unless you are planning some breaking changes at this point - which I guess you are not, after reaching beta. My general deduction is that tools with a few bugs at an early 1.0 has a better chance of succeeding than tools that stay too long in beta. It's important to ensure that interest from users, distro packagers and commercial adopters are kept alive while waiting on 1.0. I'm still waiting for pijul to be in the distro repos, though the crates version work satisfactorily. This may turn away many other potential users. Alphas and betas should be time-limited, not bugs-limited. Bugs are what patch versions in semantic versioning are for. Remember: 1.0 is a magic number - it increases the exposure of your tool and potential contributors by a large factor. By your standards, git would have stayed in pre-1.0 for a decade and would not have become this popular.
On a personal level, I use pijul for managing my dotfiles. I haven't encountered any bugs yet. The only feature I miss from git is the availability of tools like syntax highlighters for diff and record and UIs like tig, gitui and magit. But again, those are just features you could add as minor versions. That aside, pijul feels like magic. A handful of pijul commands cover most of the use-cases of git. After using git for so long, I always wonder if I'm using pijul the wrong way, even though I get the expected result. I'm only familiar with svn, git, bzr and hg. Perhaps Darcs would have given a better idea about what pijul really is.
I was thinking of doing a synchronous release of 1.0 along with the new Nest: the current one has a cool architecture (replicated over 3 datacenters, using Pijul repos as CRDTs), but doesn't scale well, I'm working on a serverless version. The hard bit is convincing Pijul that it's talking two a real Pijul repo, whereas it's actually talking to a serverless cloud (that's already solved btw).
EDIT: I also don't think there's a "right" way to use Pijul. The magic of algebra means that you can't possibly break the associativity and commutativity properties of Pijul patches, so you can do whatever you want, I'm sure it's fine.
Thank you for the reply! I'm eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release. Good luck to you regarding the new nest and well as the new venture!
> I also don't think there's a "right" way to use Pijul. The magic of algebra means that you can't possibly break the associativity and commutativity properties of Pijul patches, so you can do whatever you want, I'm sure it's fine.
There is a certain time to 'internalize' the concepts of a tool like git or pijul. It took me years with Git and I'm only starting to be confident about my git skills recently. I haven't had that much time with pijul and I haven't absorbed its concepts yet. Despite that, pijul feels like a concept that I can learn much faster. That causes this 'sunken cost' fear. If it was so easy to learn a VC tool, why did I take so much time with Git? That's what I meant with that comment.
I'm a big fan of pijul. I even have a plan in a future project to manage editing history using pijul concepts (or library).