Perhaps we should ditch the alpha thing and go back to 0.* releases

[Kodiologist]

It's confusing to have two version lines. And no matter how much we beg and plead for people to say pip install --pre, some people are going to do it without the --pre because it's the obvious thing to do, which doesn't work (e.g., vlasovskikh/funcparserlib#65 (comment)) and will continue to break worse over time (particularly because of changes between major versions of Python). There is no reason to suggest that people should be installing 0.20.0.

[scauligi]

Yeah... I'll admit I didn't quite think through the result of having the alpha releases semi-hidden from people, especially now that 0.20.0 is wildly out of date.

I originally suggested alpha releases thinking that 0.20.0 would be a "semi-stable" version that people could still use, since with our current push every release is a major breaking change... but I agree that the alphas seem to instead just be causing even more confusion (and really, nobody should be using 0.20.0 anymore).

In hindsight breaking changes aren't really a huge issue if one just specifies a fixed version in their dependencies; we just let people know that Hy is not yet stable, ye be warned.

[asemic-horizon]

nobody should be using 0.20.0 anymore

Why?

[Kodiologist]

It's missing the many improvements to Hy that have happened since, particularly, support for newer versions of Python.

[asemic-horizon]

It's also significantly less simple to use now that much of the useful functionality has been moved to libraries. Honestly, I have Hy 0.20 code serving hundreds of people daily out there, and I'm not about to learn an increasingly different language also called "Hy". My brain can't hack that.

That's the risk one gets as an early adopter I guess. I was hoping the plan to have a version 1.0 that was like Python 3 and left 0.20 alone was workable. (There are paper cuts; if you have a stable 0.35 version it's harder to steer people to the 0.20 docs).

Anyway, I can't think of a way of making my opinions and vested interests matter. Godspeed.

[Kodiologist]

It's also significantly less simple to use now that much of the useful functionality has been moved to libraries.

Using import and require seems pretty simple to me, but evidently you're not the only person who really can't stand that. It must be the same impulse that drove people from Perl (which uses CPAN) to PHP (which crams a lot of different features into the default namespace). I don't get it. Well, different strokes.

I was hoping the plan to have a version 1.0 that was like Python 3 and left 0.20 alone was workable.

That's still the plan. Hy 0.20.0 isn't going anywhere. It's just not recommended. We're not the programming police.

[asemic-horizon]

There was a survey at some point of the most-often pinned versions of Hy. I feel like because of the alpha 1.0 plan there's a big cut-off at 0.20.

Can we have some kind of "What's new since 0.xx" thing? It would ease migration pain if the need to update existing code becomes overwhelming.

[Kodiologist]

I feel like because of the alpha 1.0 plan there's a big cut-off at 0.20.

Yeah, that's one reason the alpha thing was a mistake.

Can we have some kind of "What's new since 0.xx" thing?

You got it.