Consider adding the version number to the package and artifact name

[burntcookie90]

Last year I had to manage the upgrade from 1.x -> 2.x on a project and it required quite a bit digging through commits and source code to figure out what changes needed to be made. It seems the same now needs to be done with 2.x -> 3.x. Referencing this, consider adding the version number to the package name to allow for easier migration by running release n and n-1 side by side allowing tooling to access both sources during the migration

[claude[bot]]

Thanks for the thoughtful suggestion, and for linking Jake Wharton's write-up—it's a good articulation of the problem.

We do understand the appeal of version-in-package naming, and it makes a lot of sense for very foundational JVM libraries: ones with a large transitive dependency footprint, where two major versions can easily end up on the same classpath through no fault of the consuming app. In that world, being able to run release n and n-1 side by side is genuinely valuable.

That's not really Vico's situation, though. Vico is consumed directly by apps far more than it's pulled in transitively through other libraries, so the practical benefit here would be limited to temporary side-by-side usage during an app's own migration. To support that properly we'd have to version not just the artifacts but the public package names too. That would force import and package churn on every major release, and add ongoing publication, documentation, and maintenance overhead across all of our modules.

For us, the major component of the X.Y.Z version is already the compatibility signal. Baking it into the package or artifact identity would make every major upgrade more disruptive—even in the cases where large parts of the API are unchanged—and we don't see enough of a tooling or ecosystem win to justify that trade-off.

So we're going to pass on this one. We do hear the underlying pain about migrations, though, and that's something we'd rather address through clearer migration guides and changelogs. Thanks again for taking the time to write it up.