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by diggan 397 days ago
One possible solution: Publish a new package with a new name. I've personally been thinking of doing that for some libraries, where I'd commit to never change the public API, and if I figure out a nicer way of doing something, I'd create a new library for it instead, and people who wanna use/maintain the old API can continue to do so.
1 comments
Sammi 397 days ago
People wouldn't change to the new one, because names are extremely sticky, so what's the point?
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diggan 397 days ago
Ok, that's fine by me. They can continue using the original library for whatever reason they want, including because of the name.
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skydhash 397 days ago
If they need the new one, they will switch to it. And you have the right to drop support for the old one after a while (hopefully giving everyone the time to migrate).
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Sammi 396 days ago
> If they need the new one, they will switch to it.

I already gave my argument on why this won't happen. People stick to what they know and trust. They don't change because there is some other thing that is supposedly better. It has to be 10x better before people will migrate off one thing to another. If you want to do incremental improvements to a thing, then you'll have to do incremental improvements to that thing.

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diggan 396 days ago
> They don't change because there is some other thing that is supposedly better. It has to be 10x better before people will migrate off one thing to another.

That's the point, and it makes sense from their perspective, I'd probably do the same as well.

Creating a new library instead of changing the existing one lets people chose between those two approaches. Want the latest and greatest but with API breakage? Use this library. Wanna continue using the current API? Use this library.

Instead, we kind of force the first approach on people, which I personally aren't too much of a fan of.

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skydhash 396 days ago
As I’ve said in other comments. If you’re developing a library, you can commit to its API and do security and optimization fixes and build a new one where you try a new design/approach. Merging the two together is always a bad idea.
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pier25 397 days ago
The point is API stability. Not enough people in the JS world care about this.
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