In reply to neo.

The "new" select2 script is more than a year old. Carl above complains about plugin developers not getting prepared for the new version, and same can be said about automattic. They had a year to fork the script and make whatever changes are needed to keep the functionality working as expected, and unlike the plugin developers they do not have any excuse about money or man power to do it.

When you distribute a code with a 3rd party library included you should be ready to "own" it as if you have written it. Complaining that the library do not do things the way you want them is pointless, it is open source, put your coding hours where your mouth is.

As for keeping the "old", that of course would break many plugins that use the new version, and with time there will be more and more of them, and of course there will never be any maintenance to the old version so if one day some browser will decided that it changes the way it handles multi select everybody will start rushing to get the new version because their sites will be crushing.... not a very good scenario.

People need to get used to the fact that in the real world outside of wordpress features actually get deprecated from time to time and people that depend on them should A. Test the beta version and raise problems **before** release, an B. Have plan B