<story><title>Webpack 4 Beta released</title><url>https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-beta-try-it-today-6b1d27d7d7e2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>I suspect that the Webpack team thinks that developers&amp;#x27; favourite job is to upgrade tool configurations. I mean, it&amp;#x27;s great that improvements are being made, but breaking changes are not.&lt;p&gt;Remember that the Webpack team has shown to be actively hostile to people who just want to keep their 2-year-old codebases work without doing needless upgrade work. They &lt;i&gt;removed&lt;/i&gt; the webpack 1 docs [1], so if you have a few-years-old codebase that you want to get up and running, and somehow you get a webpack error, the message from Webpack is &amp;quot;screw you, upgrade to webpack 3 first and only then we&amp;#x27;ll allow you to read the docs&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I have no reason to not expect the same to happen with Webpack 4, and the inevitable Webpack 5, 7 months from now. Webpack 2&amp;#x2F;3 docs will be subtly removed, retired and forgotten. We&amp;#x27;re all forced to keep doing work to make something work that already worked perfectly fine.&lt;p&gt;Now, I&amp;#x27;m well aware that an angry rant on the internet about the voluntary work from open source contributors is not particularly constructive. I&amp;#x27;ve singled out the Webpack team here, but the reality is that a big part of the web dev ecosystem, across languages, does not care much about backward compatibility. I&amp;#x27;d love for that attitude to change.&lt;p&gt;In semver, every major version is a tragedy.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;webpack.github.io&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;using-plugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;webpack.github.io&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;using-plugins&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thelarkinn</author><text>We strive to be as backwards compatible as possible. But we also hold ourselves accountable to keeping pace with the ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;Most breaking changes are to accommodate the number one ask of our users: faster, smaller builds.&lt;p&gt;We asked what the time frame they wanted for releases. We got out of a couple thousand responses 6mo being the sweet spot. Appreciate the candid feedback though.&lt;p&gt;In regards to the v1 docs: we wanted to have a fresh start. I don&amp;#x27;t imagine our docs pages now changing for awhile. Each major breaking change we ship a migration guide so that people can upgrade.</text></comment>
<story><title>Webpack 4 Beta released</title><url>https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-beta-try-it-today-6b1d27d7d7e2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>I suspect that the Webpack team thinks that developers&amp;#x27; favourite job is to upgrade tool configurations. I mean, it&amp;#x27;s great that improvements are being made, but breaking changes are not.&lt;p&gt;Remember that the Webpack team has shown to be actively hostile to people who just want to keep their 2-year-old codebases work without doing needless upgrade work. They &lt;i&gt;removed&lt;/i&gt; the webpack 1 docs [1], so if you have a few-years-old codebase that you want to get up and running, and somehow you get a webpack error, the message from Webpack is &amp;quot;screw you, upgrade to webpack 3 first and only then we&amp;#x27;ll allow you to read the docs&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I have no reason to not expect the same to happen with Webpack 4, and the inevitable Webpack 5, 7 months from now. Webpack 2&amp;#x2F;3 docs will be subtly removed, retired and forgotten. We&amp;#x27;re all forced to keep doing work to make something work that already worked perfectly fine.&lt;p&gt;Now, I&amp;#x27;m well aware that an angry rant on the internet about the voluntary work from open source contributors is not particularly constructive. I&amp;#x27;ve singled out the Webpack team here, but the reality is that a big part of the web dev ecosystem, across languages, does not care much about backward compatibility. I&amp;#x27;d love for that attitude to change.&lt;p&gt;In semver, every major version is a tragedy.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;webpack.github.io&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;using-plugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;webpack.github.io&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;using-plugins&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fenomas</author><text>&amp;gt; but this does not even include a list of breaking changes.&lt;p&gt;TFA:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For the full list of changes, features, and internal API modifications, &lt;i&gt;please refer to our change log!!!&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Link: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;webpack&amp;#x2F;webpack&amp;#x2F;releases&amp;#x2F;tag&amp;#x2F;v4.0.0-beta.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;webpack&amp;#x2F;webpack&amp;#x2F;releases&amp;#x2F;tag&amp;#x2F;v4.0.0-beta....&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>