[xdissent]

But both require a healthy ecosystem of packages to be any good at all. Right now the existence of io is making package authors choose to support one or the other or do the extra work to support both. Node is getting worse for that. It's a little less of a worry now that node 0.12 is out, but the politicization of the split is just going to make developers choose sides and focus their efforts on one or the other. And considering the fact that both use NPM for package distribution, package management is going to get more difficult, not easier.

[petercooper]

To be fair, at this stage, supporting both is a bit like supporting both Python 2 and 3. The name change makes it seem bigger a split than it really is.

[baudehlo]

While slightly true, as a popular package author, it's honestly no harder than adding support for another version of node. Supporting node 0.12 was a big enough change (particularly for compiled modules) that thankfully io.js was exactly the same work and required no changes. And thankfully Travis supports both.