[TazeTSchnitzel]

No, it really doesn't.

Forks are highly dangerous and fragment communities. Massive BC breaks kill adoption of new versions.

If you want nicer functions, add a new, parallel API.

(Speaking as a former PHP internals contributor.)

[MaulingMonkey]

+1. People are still on Python 2.x.

If you want safety, add a nice upgrade path so people can actually start using it easily on their existing codebases.

Tag the old API as potentially dangerous/unsafe/deprecated/ugly and warn (or error out if you can opt into a strict mode per-file) so people can upgrade incrementally without waiting for all their dependencies to first (who won't because they have no upgraded users), and without breaking all their tests in one mega-commit.

[noir_lord]

> If you want nicer functions, add a new, parallel API.

This has been one of my 'shower' (think about in the shower) projects for quite a while :).

One day I might even take a stab at it.

[Zikes]

So a new API with the old one deprecated. Same thing.