Of course, when breaking old interfaces and adding new, the proper way (in the
commercial software world, at least) is to have one release that supports both
the old and new interfaces, so the users have a chance to change things at
their own speed, rather than having to rebuild everything to use the new
version.
Another unfortunately all too uncommon thing is, when breaking an interface and
providing an exact equivalent with new syntax, is to provide a simple
search-and-destroy tool that a user can run to fix all of the old files to uuse
the new syntax, rather than forcing the user to do it by hand. After
submitting a bug (that will be rejected) that the old stuff doesn't work, of
course.
Loren
