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Ever since getting burned by Hugo (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1244023627613274115, etc.), I've made mental note when I see a maintainer complain that it's stupid to waste effort on backwards compatibility and I don't use their software. I don't think this would've saved me from Hugo since I'd never heard of the author before they wrote Hugo, but even in just a few years, these mental notes have saved me from software that constantly breaks at the maintainer's whim multiple times. 8 comments
 @danluu I probably run an ancient version but tbh I never bothered updating mostly because I never noticed any bugs :shrug: @danluu I've been using Hugo since 2016, and I haven't had any problems with backwards compatibility breaking. I think it changed something about RSS at some point, and maybe the Twitter shortcodes. In general, it's not the worst offender for me in terms of breaking BC.  @danluu Before I went on to write an SSG whose explicit goals are extensibility and compatibility, I evaluated Hugo and found it quite amusingly bad: https://baturin.org/blog/why-not-hugo/ My "favorite" part is that it parses HTML internally in two different ways: in some places with regexes, in other places with a bundled HTML parser, and also calls external utilities for AsciiDoc etc., but gives the user no way to even configure asciidoctor options.  @danluu this is why I clearly document my opinions on what "compatibility" means and what assumptions I try to operate under for what I will do to support things. I can't make everyone happy, but I *can* take steps to ensure that people aren't surprised (negatively) by things. Separating out my opinions, tech debt, and forces ecosystem evolution, is something I've found particularly effective for this. |
Gregory's Server
I don't think maintainers should cater to my whim — if they want to write software that breaks all the time, they should do it. But, per https://www.patreon.com/posts/27662175, I want to know that's their attitude so I can avoid their software.
E.g., with Hugo, literally everyone I know who uses it runs some ancient version because the amount of work it takes to migrate is greater than the effort to write a custom SSG, but this means their site has all sorts of annoying bugs because they don't get bug fixes.