Leon Mika

I just learnt that Hugo has changed their layout directory structure (via) and has done so without bumping the major version. I was a little peeved by this: this is a breaking change¹ and they’re not indicating the “semantic versioning” way by going from 1.x.x to 2.0.0. Surely they know that people are using Hugo, and that an ecosystem of sorts has sprung up around it.

But then a thought occurred: what if they don’t know? What if they’re plugging away at their little project, thinking that it’s them and a few others using it? They probably think it’s safe for them to slip this change in, since it’ll only inconvenience a handful of users.

I doubt this is actually the case: it’s pretty hard to avoid the various things that are using Hugo nowadays. But this thought experiment led to some reflection on the stuff I make. I’m planning a major change to one of my projects that will break backwards compatibility too. Should I bump the major version number? Could I slip it in a point release? How many people will this touch?

I could take this route, with the belief it’s just me using this project, but do I actually know that? And even if no-one’s using it now, what would others coming across this project think? What’s to get them to start using it, knowing that I just “pulled a Hugo”? If I’m so carefree about such changes now, could they trust me to not break the changes they depend on later?

Now, thanks to website analytics, I know for a fact that only a handful of people are using the thing I built, so I’m hardly in the same camp as the Hugo maintainers. But I came away from this wondering if it’s worth pretending that making this breaking change will annoy a bunch of users. That others may write their own post if I’m not serious about it. I guess you could call this an example of “fake it till you make it,” or, to borrow a quote from of Logan Roy in Succession: being a “serious” maintainer. If I take this project seriously, then others can do so too.

It might be worth a try. Highly unlikely that it itself will lead to success or adoption, but I can’t see how it will hurt.