On Wed, 12 Mar 2014, Faré wrote:
Major changes like that happen less than once a year (ASDF 2 in 2010, ASDF 3 in 2013, ASDF 3.1 soon in 2014), and while backward-compatibility has always been a huge priority, improvements sometimes do mean the recommended way of using ASDF changes, for the better.
For essential infrastructure like what ASDF claims to be, I expect major changes to happen less than once every 5 to 10 years. The more backwards compatibility, the better. Projects like glibc have developed significant infrastructure to enable transparent improvements (see the ABI compliance checker, DSO symbol versioning, etc.).
Every breaking change inflicts cost on a fraction of the existing userbase, in exchange for some proposed benefit to future users. Every time I have to debug breakage and change something or redesign my workflow to maintain existing capability, it encourages me to explore other, more stable or better designed options...
Sometimes "good ideas" fade after a month or two of reflection. Some survive the test because the benefit truly outweighs the cost. When that is the case, it is often helps to give the community time to prepare and minimize the number of times the community must change. So propose the change, allow a long RFC window, allow users to obtain test implementations (while still promoting the stable branch), wait a while for several changes to collect before pushing them into major new releases, etc.
- Daniel
