What is [ember-old-router] and why does it exist? [closed]

Question

Today, 77 questions were retagged to ember-old-router. There is no tag wiki.

There is nothing inside ember-router, the previous tag these questions held, to suggest that it is "new" or that there is a previous iteration of it that deserves or requires its own tag. There is nothing in the Ember.Router API guide that suggests that there is a previous iteration that deserves or requires different tagging, or how to identify it.

In fact, there is only mention of a new router anywhere on the internet, not an old router. This question, for example, mentions the changes. In fact, it points at a different section of the manual that explains the new way of doing things. Apparently they haven't even updated the API guide. Thanks, Ember.js.

We have three problems now:

1. Ember.js has completely changed their router API in a backwards incompatable way. They have done so in a pre-1.0 version, which makes using version-specific tags a bit sticky. This makes classifying router questions here on SO rather irritating to say the least.
2. The new tag name sucks and is effectively undiscoverable. How do I know whem I'm using the "old" router? Where was the tag wiki? If this was important enough to retag over half of the applicable questions under an old tag, why wasn't at least an excerpt made?
3. The mass retagging seems to have been done without pinging Meta for sanity. Why was a tag for the "old" router created instead of one for the "new" router?

I'd like to:

1. Get ahold of the retagger and ask for clarification. Pinged.
2. Discuss alternative ways to classify the two types of router question, and
3. Nuke the new tag in favor of something more clear.

Answer 1

I would first apologize for this, I didn't think users would be such disturbed. In fact Ember.js is close to 1.0, at least the team will do an 1.0.pre-3 in few days.

I decided to retag to ember-old-router (the retag is not completely done yet) because the routing system has completely changed since the 1.0.pre-2, and searching with [ember-router] will confuse users about the syntax.

Perhaps the term is very messy, but I didn't find better.

BTW, I have written a minor description of the tag, explaining to users that the questions/answers are outdated, and could be updated. Unfortunately, this description should be approved, as I see it does not appear.

One more time, I'm so sorry, I would just help... I have still to learn. Any idea is welcome in order to doing this better.

I don't like the 'new-router' too, since for me ember-router should reference the current routing system.

Answer 2

Ember.js core team member here.

Let me first give a little bit of history.

Ember.js is quickly approaching its 1.0 release. On the path from 0.1 to 1.0, we've done a lot of experimentation with our APIs, with the explicit warning that these APIs are subject to change at any time!

The flip side of our willingness to futz with the API pre-1.0 is that we can be extremely conservative about API changes post-1.0.

That's what you're seeing right now. First, we had our first implementation of the router API (which is colloquially referred to as "v1"). Then, we transitioned to a radically different version, referred to as "v2". Once that landed, we've spent the last two or three weeks iterating on "v2", which have respectively been called "v2.1", "v2.2", etc. The most recent version is the final version that will ship with Ember.js 1.0, and should henceforth just be referred to as "the Ember.js routing API."

Every old version of the routing API is dead and deprecated. They will not be supported, and there is no support for backwards compatibility. Everyone should migrate to the new router API as soon as possible. In accordance with the SemVer spec, future versions of Ember (1.1, 1.2, etc.) will maintain compatibility with the Ember.js 1.0 routing API.

Ember.js has completely changed their router API in a backwards incompatable way. They have done so in a pre-1.0 version, which makes using version-specific tags a bit sticky. This makes classifying router questions here on SO rather irritating to say the least

SemVer allows us to make breaking API changes pre-1.0. We now have our 1.0 API that people should be building against. We should make sure that anyone searching StackOverflow right now is lead towards answers that use the new router API. It should be made obvious that answers using any of the older versions of the routing API are deprecated and unsupported.

The new tag name sucks and is effectively undiscoverable. How do I know whem I'm using the "old" router? Where was the tag wiki? If this was important enough to retag over half of the applicable questions under an old tag, why wasn't at least an excerpt made?

How do other projects handle breaking API changes to pre-1.0 releases? I am open to suggestions for a different tag name, but there are no situations anyone should be using the "old" router, especially now that it is a few months old.

The mass retagging seems to have been done without pinging Meta for sanity. Why was a tag for the "old" router created instead of one for the "new" router?

The "new" router is the canonical router. Users getting started with the framework now should not need to know the difference between the new router and the old router; it is just "the router."