All sort of anxiety driven development discussions on hacker news and reddit are fueled by lack of information… or perhaps I’m too optimistic, even when there would be more information available…
Anyhow, I don’t mind waiting for packages being updated and waiting with my project upgrades from 0.18 to 0.19.
In the future it could be better to mention major package changes in elm/compiler release notes: https://github.com/elm/compiler/blob/master/upgrade-docs/0.19.md - as language changes are likely to affect at least core.
For my work and hobby projects, websocket being delayed, means that we also will be delayed on upgrading from 0.18 to 0.19. Also, there is no mention of Color, List.scanl being gone from core, which also break a lot of things for our projects.
Upgrading anxiety could also be mitigated by clear communication in release notes “that 0.18 is going nowhere fast, people will have time to upgrade” and by not hiding the previous version (0.18) documentation.
Instead of this: https://gist.github.com/evancz/9031e37902dfaec250a08a7aa6e17b10 - why not feature 0.18 docs/packages directly on https://package.elm-lang.org - in the right side column with a separate section:
Versions
latest
0.18
0.17.1
Maybe its just me, but I constantly look up docs. Having links just die or bookmark an IP address for previous version documentation is not really user friendly.
From what I’ve read above, its seems reasonable to expect that package updates take time after a new compiler/language release, which from a end-user perspective makes it also reasonable to expect that links to previous version documentation and packages are not just dropped or hidden.