> The lack of care about API&ABI stability in developer facing open source projects (interpreters, libraries, frameworks, commandline arguments) is still bizarre to me: why make your work hard to use/update?
If you're a FOSS developer with limited time and man power (and if you're lucky, limited budget) maintaining backwards compatibility is hard. So hard, that new features and bug fixes might have to take a back seat to it. Also, I'm almost certain that developers would rather be implementing new features, and fixing bugs, ahead of maintaining backward compatibility. It's much easier to show a new feature or a bug fix, than it is to show how backward compatibility was maintained.
Also, the big users of FOSS, projects like Debian (and Ubuntu) and Fedora, will rebuild their entire systems when new versions of software are released/integrated. This reduces the maintainer's requirements to keep ABI compatible.
> rebuild their entire systems when new versions of software are released/integrated
Yeah, the ability to rebuild the entire system from source whenever you need it has resulted in those communities just not caring about a number of things that really do matter on proprietary systems; it's also part of why Linux doesn't have fat binaries (why bundle multiple architectures together when everybody can just grab or build each one themselves?).
Thats the reason installing proprietary software on linux used to be a massive pain. The expectation is the distro maintainer packages everything for you but they only do that for things that are open source. This has changed since flatpack was created.
If you're a FOSS developer with limited time and man power (and if you're lucky, limited budget) maintaining backwards compatibility is hard. So hard, that new features and bug fixes might have to take a back seat to it. Also, I'm almost certain that developers would rather be implementing new features, and fixing bugs, ahead of maintaining backward compatibility. It's much easier to show a new feature or a bug fix, than it is to show how backward compatibility was maintained.
Also, the big users of FOSS, projects like Debian (and Ubuntu) and Fedora, will rebuild their entire systems when new versions of software are released/integrated. This reduces the maintainer's requirements to keep ABI compatible.