Summary

Version 3.6 of Matplotlib deprecates the seaborn style names, and renames them seaborn-v0_8. Renaming them causes technical debt to current users of these styles, and also creates technical debt in future as other styles may need to be renamed for consistency.

Proposed fix

I agree that each step of this decision starting from this PR was sensible, and yet, as an end user, I found the net effect of this change to be very user-unfriendly (I came across it when my Read the Docs builds started failing). As someone here commented, they like Matplotlib's ggplot style regardless of whether it maps onto the current version of ggplot. What happens if ggplot changes its default style? What about fivethirtyeight? Are all of these styles going to end up with awkwardly versioned names? I know I'll feel frustrated struggling to remember whether these styles are named seaborn0.8, seaborn-v08, seaborn_v0_8, etc. Since these styles exist purely for convenience (otherwise, you can just use Seaborn), making them significantly less convenient seems to defeat the purpose of including them.

While I agree it's not ideal to have styles named seaborn that don't (necessarily) match the current versions in Seaborn, I think the alternative of renaming them to a specific version (a) causes extra work for (the vast majority of) users who just want the styles to work, (b) is confusing since listing one version implies that other versions will exist, (c) creates technical debt by setting a precedent for needing to update other plotting styles. Thus, I would argue that the best among the set of not-great options is just to leave these styles -- and their names -- as-is.