On 10/13/2015 10:52 AM, Richard Hainsworth wrote:
Following on the :D not :D thread, something odd stuck out.
On 10/13/2015 03:17 PM, Moritz Lenz wrote:
<snip>
But hopefully none of them breaking backwards compatibility on such a
large scale. The last few backwards incompatible changes still cause
pain in the ecosystem. We have 390+ modules, and hand-waving away all
trouble of maintaining them seems a bit lofty.
<snip>
Surely, the idea of keeping the release number below 1.0 is to warn
early adopter developers that code is subject to change and thus in need
of maintenance?
It is. But we still should try to limit the module author's burden.
In Practice, there's a small number of people who try to update modules
to match when the compiler changed. Most module authors don't hang out
in #perl6, eager to update their modules to the lastest rakudo change.
So a large percentage of the module updates are done by group of maybe
five to a dozen volunteers. So, do the math: 5 people updating 70% of
390 modules. Modules they are usually not all that familiar with, and
usually don't have direct access. So they need to go through the pull
request dance, waiting for reaction from the maintainer. In short, it sucks.
The ecosystem hasn't yet fully recovered from the s/done/done-testing/
change, nor from the GLR, nor from the need to prefix 'unit' to some
declarations.
And this is why I'm getting increasingly frustrated and angry when
people propose major breaking changes, brushing off the implications for
the ecosystem and its maintainers with "but it's not 6.0", "shouldn't be
a problem", "we aren't stable yet".
We want to release Perl 6 by Christmas, and it'll reflect *very* badly
on us and the language if many modules in the ecosystem are broken. And
any change that requires us to touch all .pm files will result in that.
Richard, I'm sorry that I'm writing the response in an email of yours;
Mark or any number of p6l participants in the last few years triggered
the same mental response from me. I only just now articulated it.
</rant>
Cheers,
Moritz
