[Solved] Should I use core or minetest? How far does backwards compatibility go?

[Blockhead]

It was mentioned today on the Luanti Matrix that one user avoided core instead of minetest "because of backwards compatibility". With the change of name in release 5.12, some of our newer users may be confused into thinking the name core is a brand-new conception. However, this isn't the correct conception all - it is the other way around. minetest has actually been an alias for core since 2014, or release 0.4.10.

If we look at history, we can see that in 2014, ShadowNinja changed the internal name away from minetest. We can see details in Pull request #1258. Even back then, they were thinking about potential changes, and compatibility or confusion with the fork Freeminer. The pull request was merged on 2014-05-10 as commit c4359ff, making it into the stable release 0.4.10 from 2014-07-07.

If we look at the differences, we can see there was a preamble used a few times in the builtin Lua code:

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local core = engine or minetest

that was then replaced in builtin/init.lua with:

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minetest = core

and the setup of the minetest object from the C++ side was also changed to setting up core instead.

There is therefore no reason for anyone now writing a mod to use "minetest" for backwards compatibility, unless for some insane reason to support 0.4.9 and earlier versions where core was only used as an alias in a few files inside the builtin code. Yes, the internal name core was actually turned into the main and external name with the change.

To pre-empt any further discussion: There may be other reasons to choose the name Minetest; I have only discussed one. Feel free to discuss the other reasons below. I am tagging this as [Solved] though to indicate there is a clear answer in terms of compatibility.