I don't get why people expect no breaking changes [LWN.net]

I don't get why people expect no breaking changes

Posted May 21, 2025 18:58 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
In reply to: I don't get why people expect no breaking changes by vmpn
Parent article: Recent disruptive changes from Setuptools

>some responsibility for consumption of new major version

Well, have you read the article section "Reporting and updating"?

>If you want software to be maintainable long term,
>you have to have ability to make backwards incompatible releases to clean up technical debt.

That depends on what the technical debt is, what the advantage of removing it is and how many downstream users are affected.
This ratio doesn't look too good for a hyphen removal that breaks 12000 packages.

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I don't get why people expect no breaking changes

Posted May 21, 2025 19:16 UTC (Wed) by vmpn (subscriber, #55435) [Link] (6 responses)

> Well, have you read the article section "Reporting and updating"?
I did and I find the response stating you been warned for 3+ years and took no action to remediate, so please don't be surprised your workflow broke right on the money.

I don't get why people expect no breaking changes

Posted May 21, 2025 19:51 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (5 responses)

It takes one package in the dependency chain that I don't have control over to break the build.

Please always keep in mind the benefit and the costs of breaking changes as a trade off.
A simple breakage that breaks 12k packages easily wastes several years of net human worktime. So is it worth it to save you 5 hours of maintenance cost during the next 5 years?

It's always easy to expect everybody to update and do the work, if you don't have to actually spend/pay the work.

I don't get why people expect no breaking changes

Posted May 22, 2025 0:40 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (4 responses)

> It's always easy to expect everybody to update and do the work, if you don't have to actually spend/pay the work.

We can turn that around very easily. The Setuptools developers were, technically, under no obligation to revert the change at all. They could just as easily have said "What part of 'NO WARRANTY' and 'major version bump' did you not understand?" and WONTFIXed all the bug reports. That they were generous enough to revert their change should be taken with gratitude, not contempt for the change having been made in the first place.

I don't get why people expect no breaking changes

Posted May 22, 2025 5:51 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

I was not talking about whether to revert or not, but whether to deprecate or not.

I don't get why people expect no breaking changes

Posted May 22, 2025 10:00 UTC (Thu) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link] (2 responses)

If we take the view that the setuptools developers are under no obligation to play nice and be considerate, then it stands that their users are under to obligation to respond with gratitude. You're perfectly allowed to do that, but it always cuts both ways.

You can take a "let others deal with it" attitude, but you can't force users to like it. Doing unpopular things is a reliable way to become unpopular.

I don't get why people expect no breaking changes

Posted May 29, 2025 5:05 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

FOSS is a gift. Gratitude is the normal social response to gifts. Nobody was forced to use Setuptools. Or at least, the Setuptools developers themselves did not force anyone to use Setuptools.

I don't get why people expect no breaking changes

Posted May 29, 2025 6:41 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> FOSS is a gift. Gratitude is the normal social response to gifts.

??? Depends on the giver.

Don't remember the story (I don't like Dickens), but he wrote a wonderful short about about a Christmas meal thrown for "the deserving" (or maybe undeserving).

Oh - and as far as development "aid" is concerned, most gift horses most definitely SHOULD be looked in the mouth.

Cheers,
Wol