It seems clear to me from reading this and many other threads that there is a subset of potential Julia 1.0+ users who fairly reasonably would like to explore using the language, but haven’t been around for much of the preamble and are understandably a bit perplexed when they encounter some of the (however transient) rough edges. And it seems (or I’d guess) that a fair number of these people are also looking to use Julia, at least initially, much more using the REPL than by creating modules, packages or even .jl files.
Accordingly I think a practical and easy change would be to make it so that the startup banner in the REPL by default included some pointers to key documentation explaining what 1.0 means w.r.t. 0.7 and previous versions etc, then that might go a long way to those users figuring at least part of the story out for themselves.
So that it isn’t a nuisance for users who are already informed of the issues here, there could be some magic REPL command that would turn off this feature.
Also, I’m not sure if it’s feasible but if there was some heuristic way to (again probably only when the REPL is being used) to detect some of the most common things that trigger these annoyances and help point to appropriate documentation then that could go a bit further.
If people think this might be useful I wouldn’t mind taking a stab at a PR. Pretty sure I could do the banner part; the heuristic would surely require some assistance from those much more familiar than me.