Thanks for the review. I'm actually tempted to hold off merging this for the moment as it's semi-breaking -- if I were to start using this and add a README, then users of older versions would get broken.

(Reviving due to discussion in srobo/inventory#10)

This is definitely a breaking change, but it's quite an important one. I'm not sure how we go about rolling this out in a clean way, so it might be best to just ship it and ask people to update. What do the failures look like for older clients, outside of inv-validate erroring?

I know that Rich has expressed in the past a desire to extract the inventory tools from the sr.tools, which I had ben pondering as a good time to introduce a breaking change.

I'm not actually sure if that's a good idea and I had been considering ways to do it which made one or other (or both) parts library-like such that they could still interoperate.

I can't recall what the failure modes are for older cilents when we add a README file, however I doubt that they're helpful. I did consider adding something which would improve the error message, however that becomes a bit chicken & egg (other, perhaps, than in the breakout scenario described above).

I know that Rich has expressed in the past a desire to extract the inventory tools from the sr.tools, which I had ben pondering as a good time to introduce a breaking change.

I think that extracting the inventory tools from sr.tools is a good idea. The vast majority of volunteers do not use any other functionality.

I'm not actually sure if that's a good idea and I had been considering ways to do it which made one or other (or both) parts library-like such that they could still interoperate.

Sure.

I can't recall what the failure modes are for older cilents when we add a README file, however I doubt that they're helpful. I did consider adding something which would improve the error message, however that becomes a bit chicken & egg (other, perhaps, than in the breakout scenario described above).

I'd encourage increasing the major version number for this change.

Hi @PeterJCLaw, what are the next steps to get this moved forward?

Perhaps we could update the tool, wait a period for volunteers to update (say 6 months, with comms?) and then add a README to the inventory repo?

Hi @PeterJCLaw, what are the next steps to get this moved forward?

Perhaps we could update the tool, wait a period for volunteers to update (say 6 months, with comms?) and then add a README to the inventory repo?

Yeah, something like that. Or we could revisit the idea of extracting the inventory tooling.