this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
61 points (96.9% liked)

Programming

17313 readers
92 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
61
Is it really a breaking change if a method changes output after an update? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This might seem obviously "yes" at first, but consider a method like foo.debugRepr() which outputs the string FOO and has documentation which says it is meant only to be used for logging / debugging. Then you make a new release of your library and want to update the debug representation to be **FOO**.

Based on the semantics of debugRepr() I would argue that this is NOT a breaking change even though it is returning a different value, because it should only affect logging. However, if someone relies on this and uses it the wrong way, it will break their code.

What do you think? Is this a breaking change or not?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"if someone relies on this and uses it the wrong way"

The wrong way for you might be the perfect solution for someone else. Once things are being used, you have no idea how people will use them, and they will likely use them in ways you didn't anticipate.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

If you go using code in a way contrary to its documentation, you can't expect semantic versioning to have semantic value to you.

Nothing in there stops you. You are perfectly free to hack anything in your code. But it's completely outside of your relationship with the author, and frees him from any problem an update may cause you.