Thread

1. recursivedoubts · 1790522383 · focus · HN ↗

   They are open source developers, giving away free software as a gift. There is no duty here.

   We can speak, respectfully, of how important backwards compatibility is to us, and ask nicely for them to give more of their time to support it when their free sodftware isn't backwards compatible. Perhaps we can even offer to help implement it.

   But they have no duty to do so or to "care" for their users. (They have already demonstrated they care for their users, btw, by giving them free software.)

   EDIT: I missed an important part of the story, which is that they mutated existing files in a non-backwards compatible manner. That should have been avoided, I understand where the (secondary) author is coming from now.

   1. bsoqk · 1790522665 · focus · HN ↗

      If I give away food I have a duty not to poison you. It doesn’t matter you didn’t pay for it.

      1. Grombobulous · 1790522697 · focus · HN ↗

         Software isn’t food.

         1. pdonis · 1790522861 · focus · HN ↗

            So software that deletes important data of yours without any warning is ok because at least it isn't poisoning you?

            1. brookst · 1790523293 · focus · HN ↗

               If you have to twist things so far that intent doesn’t matter, something’s wrong.

               1. jeremyjh · 1790525144 · focus · HN ↗

                  According to TFA, it was completely intentional that they deleted someone’s data that had been created with a different program. Otherwise they would have acknowledged it was a bug. I do not know if this is true, only that it is what TFA claims.

                  1. Grombobulous · 1790526053 · focus · HN ↗

                     It’s not great that Neovim destroyed/replaced files that aren’t clearly under its purview. They should have probably also made the consideration that a lot of Neovim users are going to be migrating from Vim.

                     Maybe if they’re making their own persistent undo standard, use different file naming conventions.

                     That said, as a fork of Vim, maybe the Neovim authors are at least partially reasonable in assuming that you’re not running multiple forks of Vim that could then potentially conflict with each other. It just sucks that they never really thought of a migration path for this particular feature.

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