Clojure and Pull Request Controversy

[Dukc]

On Friday, 30 November 2018 at 18:16:37 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
> Just thinking loud: if the libraries are incompatible and you 
> get an error while trying to use them together, that would be a 
> good thing. There is no silent breakage. The third party 
> library authors can be be contacted and asked to update their 
> libraries.

In that way, yes, a good thing. But I completely disagree with it 
being a good idea nonetheless. The problem isn't that the 
libraries need to be updated, the problem is that they need to do 
so immediately.

For library upkeepers, such global versioning would be 
effectively as bad as just removing autodecoding overnight 
without any deprectation period. Or perhaps even worse, since 
they would probably have to leave behind compatibility with 
autodecoding version, as there are always libraries that won't 
migrate quickly enough.

Of course, we could say that the libraries, when they migrate, 
need to keep backwards compatibility, so late migrators will keep 
working. But I can hardly imagine that every library keeper will 
bother and remember to test both versions.