But look at it from the other side. Users that don't read your documentation and expect your software to work like they imagined are just a huge pain in the ass.
Fact of life: the vast majority of your users do not read your documentation (or do not do so carefully enough that what you put in your docs is an ironclad proof that all users adhere to). That's literally what Hyrum's law is about. Of course, you can choose to do whatever you want. It's valuable to recognize of course that you're trading off good will from your users with whatever technical improvement is getting made. Sometimes it's appropriate and inevitable (e.g. old behavior is just wrong or harmful and better to cut off). In the vast majority of cases though it's better to just have a better process in place to manage this with minimal disruption, identifying and communicating with broken users, and only then making that change.
Look. Even vcpkg broke which is a Microsoft product. I agree that there can be a continuum some times, but can we agree that this specific instance isn't anything like that? Even without vcpkg, the list of things impacted are anything that depends on Bazel, homebrew, conan, etc. The blast radius is quite wide regardless of documentation.
Aint nobody give a shit about you if you aren't bringing five or six figures as customer. Nobody is stopping rewrite that happened to break undocumented stuff you relied on if you $10/mo.
This case is different as breakage probably affected github/microsoft themselves
You just described >90% of users. Everyone does this for something, most people do it for most things.
You minimally read the docs, get something working and then leave it alone. Of course you're going to be pissed off when an implicit assumption which has been stable for a long time is broken.
Turns out scripts contain download an archive from github and check against a hardcoded checksum copy&pasted into that script. All of those broke. None of the authors will have looked up exactly how github had calculated said checksum.
Worse, you can't expect other people to host your data for free, forever. If you want your data distributed, you need to check first if the platform is suitable for your purposes.
If your product supports some particular behavior, it will be used regardless of what you document.
Microsoft was once renown for bug-compatibility so as not to break their users. The new wave of movers and breakers would forget that wisdom at their peril.
This has nothing to do with free vs. paid? The question is whether giving someone 99 of the same fish entitles them to expect the 100th one you throw in to be the same kind of fish, whether they paid for it or not.
This. You have to draw the line somewhere. Was this specific choice that line? Maybe not, but sometimes users aren’t right and changes just need to occur to ensure other asks from the same users can be delivered.
