These are very good points, but I think many of us think that Julia is generally too young to provide guarantees of backwards compatibility until 1.0 lands. Many people have tried very hard to handle these things with deprecation periods, but there are sometimes situations where that's not possible. In those cases, getting from where we are to where we want to be requires breaking things.
-- John On Oct 3, 2014, at 7:39 AM, Jan Kybic <[email protected]> wrote: > On Friday, September 5, 2014 11:07:05 PM UTC+2, Tim Holy wrote: > I'm pleased to announce a major overhaul of the Images package. The big > change > is deeper integration with other packages: Color and FixedPointNumbers. > > > Thank you very much for your work, I am sure these changes are in the good > direction. But of course, some of the changes break existing code, as I have > discovered myself today - after Pkg.update() my code no longer works. I am > sure I will find the problems and correct them but at the moment I just > wanted to make some more general comments: > > a) The seemingly innocent command 'Pkg.update()' is actually quite dangerous. > Could it not warn - "there are important changes in package XXX, you can read > about them in YYY, are you sure you want to update now?" > > b) Backward compatibility is very important. People will get angry if they > have to change their code with every new version. I know it is not always > possible but it would be nice to have the "old style" and "new style" live > together in parallel for some time, while issuing depreciation warnings, > before actually changing the default behaviour. > > Keep up the good work. Yours, > > Jan > >
