“Backwards Incompatibility”

Today UserLand released a new pref for Radio, which enables/disables the automatic uploading of a site's directory.opml file. The default value for this new preference shuts off the directory.opml file, so anybody who depends on it will have to change that preference. (First they have to know that they need to change that preference.)

This breaks the Downstreamer, which is one of the tools I wrote for Clark Venable at the University of PA, Hershey.

This wouldn't bother me if they'd give warning that they were going to change this behavior so it could have been anticipated ahead of time. Even better would have been a public RFC for the development community to tell them how serious the breakage is.

Actually, since Clark's machines are upstreaming from OS X, this may not be an issue. Upstreaming is already a cranky, unreliable beast on that platform, so the directory.opml files weren't always being uplaoded anyway.

I'm surprised at how badly this has annoyed me. Don't be surprised if I read this tomorrow and decide to tone it down a little. (I've alread pulled out some comments about "a commitment to breaking apps and servers.")