Phobos - breaking existing code

[David Soria Parra via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 28 November 2014 at 23:33:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Just for fun, I've decided to try and get MicroEmacs in D added 
> to the dub registry. The last time it compiled was 2 years ago.
>
> I wound up with at least a dozen references to Phobos names 
> that have disappeared. No corrective action was indicated, just 
> "undefined symbol". I have to go refigure out what the code was 
> trying to do, and go poking through the Phobos documentation to 
> see what will work today.
>
> I know there's been a lot of "break my code" advocacy lately, 
> but this code was only 2 years old.
>
> I fully understand how unfriendly this is to users and how 
> discouraging it can be to have their recently working code 
> shattered and scattered. We need to do a lot better.

To be fair, this is already a minor annoyance between every DMD
release, that I have to go through existing D code and fix all
the nits, which are mostly phobos backwards compatibility breaks. 
This is making it hard to advocate to write more code in D.

It's been a while since I had to do that the last time with a new
gcc or libc release.