Honestly Wube should go ahead and change the name of stack inserters now

Originally posted by Alfonse215

I agree with this. Except for this:

adding the updated internal name will allow mods to switch over earlier

That's the thing: should they actually change the internal name? Like, ever?

That would break a lot of mods, and it's not like there could be a period where the entity has two internal names as a grace period. Every mod that deals with stack inserters would instantly break with whatever version they change that internal name on. And it would be difficult (but not impossible) for individual mods to have their own version with a grace period, where they work with both the old name and the new name depending on which version of Factorio they're running on.

It would be better for them to keep the internal names the same forever. Yes, it's confusing for mod makers, but most Factorio players aren't mod makers and really don't care about the internal name. But they do care that a bunch of their favorite mods don't randomly break because of an update.

Programmers have to deal with hacks all the time. What's one more?

The internal name of the new inserter should probably be something like "real-stack-inserter".

Originally posted by BengiPrimeLOL

I don't know if Factorio actually uses it, but there's a system called symantic versioning that is often used and very useful in software, and even when it's not formally used, the fundamental principles are loosely adhered to. Simply, symver says you have 3 basic numbers in your versioning, XX.YY.ZZ (ie 1.2.73) that are defined as such, with possible implications for a game like factorio:

XX - Backward Incompatible Features. major changes _that break previous compatibility_. Changes like this would likely see mods break completely, saves may not carry over or require big conversions that may break some aspects of the save.

YY - New, Backward Compatible Features. minor changes or feature additions that do not break any backward compatibility. Mods would likely work, but mod makers may want to add bits to their mods to tie into new features. Save files would likely be safe.

ZZ - Minor bug fixes. Generally no new features, mods & saves would likely be unaffected.

Given this, changing something as fundamental as a name of an item would likely constitute a major update, and would not be allowed on a 1.X branch. If it were a purely cosmetic change, like they have a 'display name' that's just used for presenting it to the user but has no code implications, that might be a different story.

This is all just arbitrary speculation, I'm not saying Factorio actually does this. If you're interested in reading more on symver, there's a nice website here:
https://semver.org