My perspective is that the Neovim maintainer implemented a change that would delete data created by another program on other people's computers. They knew this would happen in advance, and it was done anyway.
vim and neovim have different defaults for the undo file, if neovim overwrites a vim file then it can only be because the user changed the paths for both to be the same. in that case neovim had no way of knowing that the file was used by another program.
AFAICT neither has any default for `undodir`; the user must set it explicitly. I think a user could be forgiven for assuming that it was fine to use the same value when trying out a migration from vim to neovim, and that neovim wouldn't actively delete vim's state data.
Sure, maybe they should have backed it up or used a different directory, but I think it's reasonable to expect that many people wouldn't. If a software developer is only going to consider the scenario where their users are thinking/behaving exactly as they are, then they aren't particularly good at what they're doing.
My perspective is that the Neovim maintainer implemented a change that would delete data created by another program on other people's computers. They knew this would happen in advance, and it was done anyway.
vim and neovim have different defaults for the undo file, if neovim overwrites a vim file then it can only be because the user changed the paths for both to be the same. in that case neovim had no way of knowing that the file was used by another program.
AFAICT neither has any default for `undodir`; the user must set it explicitly. I think a user could be forgiven for assuming that it was fine to use the same value when trying out a migration from vim to neovim, and that neovim wouldn't actively delete vim's state data.
Sure, maybe they should have backed it up or used a different directory, but I think it's reasonable to expect that many people wouldn't. If a software developer is only going to consider the scenario where their users are thinking/behaving exactly as they are, then they aren't particularly good at what they're doing.