We recently discovered what we would consider a breaking change to the grades API, which was part of the Juniper release. Before the change, the API returned the email addresses of students in the course. After the change, it only returned email addresses if the course is part of a masters program.
We have a few questions:
- Is this a breaking change?
It felt like a breaking change to us. It broke an integration with the API which was expecting to use student’s email addresses as a key.
- If this is a breaking change, how should it have been communicated?
The open edX proposal to use conventional commit messages specifies that a commit with a breaking change should include an exclamation mark in the commit message subject. Is that sufficient?
Should breaking changes be included in release notes? How?
- Is there anything we should do to communicate this particular change now?
This change was part of the Juniper release, which isn’t even officially supported any more. But, now that we know this change was made, should it be noted somewhere? Is there someplace that interested parties might find it more easily than this thread?
Thanks for your thoughts,
Peter Pinch
MIT Open Learning