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[RFC] Compatibility layer

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#644 8 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by reading issue #582 and the discussion here about custom output formats, DEBUG_FORMAT, and compatibility with older debug versions. Determine whether a version-aware compatibility layer is feasible and define the expected behavior for users across library versions; the issue is done when that design has a clear decision and implementation scope.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

change-major discussion

One problem we're going to be facing, now that I'm thinking about it:

We will be introducing the ability to specify a custom output format with #582.

This new output support (the env-var support) won't be available for older versions, which means debug will now be showing different output formats for old versions of the library, which is a problem since debug is almost as old as node.js IIRC.

That means users that set DEBUG_FORMAT will see inconsistent output formats for code that is any older than the new major version release.


Should there be a compatibility layer introduced in the newest version that sniffs out older versions of debug and patches them up, being version-aware in terms of the API?

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
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Forks
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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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