Earlier in the week I found a logical bug in an open source project I had been building against. After double checking the documents to verify I hadn’t mis-understood anything I decided to open an issue for it…

The problem boiled down to a problem of parsing a value and interpreting it as an undefined term if it was absent. In the documentation, if the value wasn’t specified it was to be considered a certain value by default. After reading the code and raising the issue it was to great sadness I read the reply

Too many tools in the field currently using this…

I totally agree that breaking compatibility is a serous thing; however, we should all be taking steps to deprecate and release new changes with our projects. Saying a change won’t happen for this reason is probably the best way to guarantee eventually the community of adopters will move on to a better kept library that solves roughly the same problem.