Julian Foad wrote on Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 17:17:34 +0100: > Re. shelving... > > Branko Čibej wrote: > > Unless you're absolutely certain that the format and semantics of the > > CLI commands won't change, I do suggest adding an "experimental" warning > > to the help text. > > Done. Thanks.
I don't think saying "This command is not forwards compatible" in the help text will prevent users from relying on it being forwards compatible; which, in turn, will discourage us, come 1.11, to make incompatible changes to this command. Perhaps we should rename the command to, say, "xshelve" — like the "X-" prefix of experimental email headers, but without a minus for ease of typing? Then we could have a convention, "any command whose name starts with 'x' is not guaranteed to be forwards compatible", and we'd be able to make incompatible changes (to "xshelve") without worrying about users asking for compatibility despite the documentation. In 1.11, if we wanted to make "shelve" stable, we could even continue to accept "xshelve" as an alias, if the semantics of xshelve@1.10 and shelve@1.11 are compatible.