Hm. Those messages are the deprecation warnings though, just displayed as an error instead of a warning. That’s what the --depwarn=error julia argument does. If you’re proposing to have the depwarns in 1.0, there’s no reason to actually have 0.7 in the first place. Furthermore, the depwarn is just supposed to be an informative message about a future removal of functionality. Code from 0.6.x still works fine on 0.7, it just also displays that message. The functionality used previously doesn’t exist anymore on 1.0, and the depwarn gives the information what to replace it with on 0.7.
If there was some time between 0.7 and 1.0 or some note appeared when starting 1.0 for the first time (“This is a new major version - if you’re upgrading older code or want to change habits, use 0.7 with deprecation warnings.”), I think all of that annoyance with “Why does my code not work” would have been avoided and as far as I know/read on discourse here, the plan is to do just that. It seems that people don’t really want to read release notes if they can avoid it and just want to use the latest version - in which case they hopefully are aware that a major version jump is going to be breaking and are not surprised that it actually is.