Broken plugins

[mavit]

I think it’s worth calling out loudly and clearly in the changelog that version 0.16.0 is not backwards compatible with previous versions. The calling conventions are different, as is the JSON output schema.

I imagine that few if any of the “Plugins for other software” mentioned in the README have yet been (or, in some cases, will ever be) updated to work with the new version. This should probably be mentioned in the README, to avoid user frustration.

Frustratingly, the developers of these integrations can’t call proselint --version to determine what version of proselint they're dealing with, since this option has been removed.

[Nytelife26]

I suppose this is a broader issue with changelogs automatically generated from commits. I'll add notices detailing the breaking changes to the changelog and a warning that integrations are likely to be broken to the readme by Sunday. On the latter note, integrations that are broken will have been broken for multiple versions now. Aside from the Sublime plugin and ALE, I am not aware of any conscious effort to keep them updated.

[mavit]

On the latter note, integrations that are broken will have been broken for multiple versions now.

I think I must be missing something?

$ proselint --version
0.14.0
$ echo foo | proselint --json -
{"data": {"errors": []}, "status": "success"}

$ uv run proselint --version
usage: proselint [options] <command>
proselint: error: unrecognized arguments: --version
$ uv run proselint version
Proselint 0.16.0
$ echo foo | uv run proselint --json -
usage: proselint [options] <command>
proselint: error: argument : invalid choice: '-' (choose from version, check, dump-config)
$ echo foo | uv run proselint check --output-format=json -
{
  "result": {
    "file:///-": {
      "error": {
        "code": -31998,
        "message": "[Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/-'"
      }
    }
  }
}$ echo foo > temporary-file
$ uv run proselint check --output-format=json temporary-file
{
  "result": {
    "file:///temporary-file": {
      "diagnostics": []
    }
  }
}$

There is no version tagged between 0.14.0 and 0.16.0.

[Nytelife26]

That's an unfortunate byproduct of a change GitHub made at the end of October, and enabled by default. I learned about immutable tags the hard way today. During the process of troubleshooting the release workflow, we noticed that updating the v0.15.0 tag was being rejected by the remote. The only way to resolve that was to skip the version entirely. I assure you, I was as baffled as you probably are.

[suchow]

@Nytelife26 I think the point @mavit is making by showing the code version snippet is that the standard way for checking versions, --version, works on 0.14.0 but not on 0.16.0 because it now expects the argument to be version (which is nonstandard), not --version (which is standard and matches what was there before). I think the solution to the narrow issue is just to add --version as an alias or something. The solution to the broader issue is a bigger discussion, but we're using semantic versioning and have never released a version 1.x that would come with any guarantee of backwards compatibility. Once you feel like you've converged on the big changes you're making, it might be time to start thinking about releasing a 1.0.0.

[Nytelife26]

I thought I had seen more linters use version as a subcommand than those using version as a flag, but I can only verify that is the case for Ruff. Based on this, and the problems discussed here, I think reintroducing --version as an alias is a good idea. Another step we could take to mitigate future problems would be adding a version key to the JSON output, so other applications don't have to run --version or version separately to decide how to parse it.

We may be nearing a state where releasing a stable version makes sense. My long-term plan was to focus on updating the Python version of proselint, and save 1.0.0 for the upcoming rewrite, but we can always use a future major version for that.