On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 7:55 AM, Stuart Halloway <stuart.hallo...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> Spec will be in alpha for a while. That is part of the point of it being a
> separate library. Can you say more about what problems this is causing?
>
> Stu
>
>
As a library maintainer, I am forced to upgrade and release my library any
time something I depend upon makes a breaking change.  I don't get paid for
maintaining open source libraries, it's something I do in my spare time, so
I prefer to do it on my own schedule.  When an underlying library makes a
breaking change, I get dozens of urgent requests from people who need me to
cut a new release ASAP, and by Murphy's Law, that often happens when I have
very little time to do it.  It's a nuisance.

Clojure is pretty good about not making breaking changes, but it happens
from time to time.  Clojurescript is less good about not making breaking
changes, and therefore, maintaining Clojurescript libraries is more of a
headache.  On the plus side, Clojurescript users seem to care very little
about backwards compatibility (most keep up with the latest version), so
sometimes it is easier to make a change to keep up with a change in
Clojurescript than one in Clojure, where I am expected to not only support
the latest breaking change, but also the last several releases.

Anything that is labeled as "alpha" is waving a big red flag that there
could be breaking changes at any time with little warning.  For my
libraries which depend on spec, there's no way I'm going to bring them out
of alpha status until spec comes out of alpha status.  If I make an
official release of something that depends on spec, then I'm going to be on
the hook to rapidly cut a new release every time spec changes, which could
be at any time.  I don't want that hassle.  I don't want to make a promise
to the community to maintain a stable product if the thing I depend upon
has not made a similar promise.  When spec reaches a point where the API
will not be changing, or rather, when we know that new changes will only be
additive, I can begin to trust that it won't be a huge maintenance headache
to release something based on spec.

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