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The argument in the article seems strange to me: "downstream relied on undocumented behavior, and now that behavior has changed, so downstream breaks" So what
by Trombone5 12y ago
The argument in the article seems strange to me: "downstream relied on undocumented behavior, and now that behavior has changed, so downstream breaks"
So what should upstream do? After all, the premise must be that the upstream does not control or even know about all the clients! The entire point is to separate the concerns, so how could upstream know if a bug fix is a breaking change if it passes the internal regression tests?
Of course they can't know without asking downstream, and hence the use of release candidates.
- StefanKarpinski 12y agoPeople rely on undocumented behavior all the time. In fact, most projects would be unusable if you didn't – it's a rare project that's perfectly documented. You're not going to hear from most of your users when you break stuff for them – most of them will just be silently annoyed. Enough annoyance from enough people and your library/language/whatever develops a bad reputation.