For old applications, they will break one way or another.
If it is not by gnustep-make, it will be by others later.
The "2.0" release of gnustep-make is a good indication of major changes,
otherwise, it will be
1.14 as gnustep-base.
While I am not an official figure to say so,
most major updates usually break old application, like GTK-2.0, Lucene 2.0,
Ruby 2.0 (not yet), etc.
Usually the 1.9.x release are the last one for backward compatibility.
I think it is better to ask project maintainers to update for
gnustep-make 2.0.
I agree here! I'm by no means a developer, but when Nicola announced the changes to -make I expected a whole bunch of applications to become obsolete (for a lock of a better word). Like Yen-Ju said, when a major release is made you need to expect incompatibilities.
I think the bigger issue at hand here is what to do now! It's been a fact that most applications built on top of GNUstep are becoming more and more outdated (most hadn't had a release in at least 2 years), including Project Center, which is way overdue for an update release.
In my opinion, the GNUstep project only needs to worry about the applications/libraries in its repository, as it's after all GNUstep software. The other, outside GNUstep, projects are the ones who need to put guidelines such as "Compatible with -make
1.x", or whatever. Even then, GNUstep-core shouldn't worry about past releases of it's own software as they will, at some point, become old.
Backward compatibility is great, but you need to know when to draw the line!
Stefan