Please be mindful of version bounds and semantic versioning when tagging your packages

[Tamas_Papp]

@yakir12

So we…agree? Tools is the solution. How automated they are, or how exactly they should work, is besides the point. But a bleak future where everything is stalled, locked to some old version, etc, will be avoided with tools.

I am not sure we agree. My position is roughly the following:

1. Tools are important, and should reduce the cost of maintaining compat bounds significantly, potentially to zero (for those who opt-in to some automated setup).

2. Getting a smooth workflow with these tools may take some time and experimentation. We should be patient and keep an open mind in the meantime. (And trust that in the unlikely case this experiment does not work out, the devs maintaining the General registry will backtrack and figure out a solution instead of dooming the package ecosystem — they have a very good track record so far).

3. Once maintaining compat bounds has a small cost, packages which don’t do it despite requests should be considered abandoned in practice. From that point, the question is more general than compat bounds (ie how to deal with abandonware). The fallback option of having some set of versions which still works will be valuable in that scenario.

4. How the above tools work is not “beside the point”, it is very important.

5. I consider a scenario “where everything is stalled” entirely hypothetical and unrealistic. I am not sure that apocalyptic visions really help this discussion.