microsoft
[BUG] Adding new on-by-default telemetry is a breaking change, and should involve a major version bump
Description/Screenshot
The v2.8.0 release notes include this line:
fetch Ajax tracking was also been change to be on by default from this version moving forward, if you are running in an environment without fetch support and you are using an incompatible polyfill (that doesn't identify itself as a polyfill) or the SDK you start seeing recursive or duplicate (fetch and XHR requests) being reported you WILL need to add disableFetchTracking with a value of true to your configuration to disable this functionality.
As a user of your library, enabling new telemetry by default is a big deal, especially for something that like a fetch URL that can easily include something like a user-specified GET parameter. Our team is careful to disable telemetry like this, so every case like this amounts to a breaking change for us (we have to modify our code to disable the new "feature"). It's very frustrating to see a change note this dangerous buried in the middle of a non-breaking version update.
In the future, it would be preferable to have new on-by-default telemetry be highlighed in release notes as a breaking change, and for it to accordingly use a major semantic version bump.
Steps to Reproduce n/a
Expected behavior Library changes that require users to make code changes should be clearly marked as breaking changes.
Additional context n/a
Noted: Will rework the release notes for this release as it's now out there.
For context (not that it helps for your team) we delayed this change from a 2.7.x release due to these concerns, but we have been receiving more issues about not having it enabled by default which is why we flipped the switch with this 2.8.x release.
Thanks for updating the notes!
I definitely appreciate the desire to make the defaults consistent with the related on-by-default cases, and there's not much to be done about it now; we'd just appreciate such changes being semver-major in the future, to make it harder to introduce GDPR/etc issues by accident during routine dependency updates.