Persistent undo exists to recover from an accidental write-and-quit mid-session nuking some stuff you really didn't intend to delete. If you care about its contents beyond a handful of hours, you either need to adopt proper version management, or start making backups.
Reading the PR the change was needed because the old undofile format was fundamentally broken. They considered making an undofile-upgrade mechanism, but it would've caused more issues that it would've solved. In other words: stuck between a rock and a hard place.
A duty of care also means occasionally having to break things to make it better, or else you end up being stuck with spacebar heating[0] forever. As a user it does suck, but that's the price you have to pay for using actively-developed software.
That's one use case, sure, but not the only possible one.
> Reading the PR the change was needed because the old undofile format was fundamentally broken.
That's a good reason to have a new undo file that's completely separate from the old one, and use the new one instead, and tell users "Hey, whatever undo information you had in your old undo file isn't accessible any more through neovim, you'll have to use vim if you need to get to it."
It's not a good reason for just deleting the old undo file with no warning. All the new version needs to do is ignore it, not nuke it.
"All software should be shit because most software is shit"
Relax for a second. Get some perspective.
On that board, silently deleting a user's files is obviously justified. What would be out of line is complaining about software silently deleting user files.
[1] Long ago. Galaxy far away.
```markdown
abhorrent
/əbˈhɒr(ə)nt/
Abhorrent is an adjective that means morally very bad, hateful, or causing strong disgust and loathing.
```
I realise that this causes strong disgust and loathing in you, but can you please expand upon how it's morally very bad to prioritise speed and ease of use over undelete capability in Neovim? Are you unable to make backups or use Git?
> Are you unable to make backups or use Git?
Ah yes, the old perty theft justification as applied to intentionally-inflicted data loss; "They won't mind if I take/delete this, they (should) have insurance".
People are making it sound like this is a huge company with a product and not a grouping of curious people with a couple hours of free time on a Sunday.
Most likely they never thought about it, then it broke, then it was not impactful enough to fix on their free time compared to other stuff.
https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/13973#issuecomment-789...
If it's really just a toy with no expectation of not unexpectedly destroying user data then they ought to make that more clear.