The Lua community needs to learn to move on
24 points by tusharhero
24 points by tusharhero
An open source project trying to provide support for 10-year-old versions is just crazy.
They need to be working on their dev branch and backporting fixes to their last released version for maybe a year--then cutting a new release and dropping support for N-1. Anything else should require support contracts.
Users don't understand how abusive it is to expect support or backwards compatibility for 10-year-old versions, when there's no corporate giant behind funding all the work.
Open source maintainers should not be internalizing a requirement to do that, and should just reject it and aggressively drop support.
An open source project trying to provide support for 10-year-old versions is just crazy.
I've been doing this for 8 years. Not only is it not crazy, it's not even hard. There are a handful of minor inconveniences; that's all.
You're making a bunch of assertions without any evidence or reasoning; assuming that things are the same in Lua as they are in other languages. They are not. Dropping support for Lua 5.3 (released in 2015) would be one of the dumbest things I could possibly do given that TIC-80 uses that version and loads of my users use TIC-80.
I like Perl’s toolchain version support policy, aka the Lyon Amendment to the Lancaster Consensus. More software that aims to provide basic infrastructure should have this kind of stability.
Would be a lot better article if it gave like ... actual reasons?
I understand that Lua is an embeddable language and if you make a decision in a point in time to bundle, say Lua 5.2 in your app and you build a plugin ecosystem around it, then you’re married to it forever. But then that’s your app’s ecosystem to take care.
If I were in Mike Pall's place, I'm not sure I would go so far as to delete Git tags for previous versions, but I would be thinking very much along the lines of, "Do you have a support contact?"
We should really be (gradually?) moving into supporting only the latest PUC-Rio Lua and the latest LuaJIT, at best.
YES, I've been saying this to people for YEARS but the biggest hurdle for all of them is, as mentioned, their ecosystem breaking apart over such changes.
Curb your expectations.
P.S.: I like lua for what it is.