GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, breaks existing scripts

Here's the change and it's justification:<p><a href="http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/commit/?id=c6e3ea61d9f08aa0128a0eb13d31a2fbad376f99" rel="nofollow">http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/commit/?id=c6e3ea6...</a><p><i>Change -r to follow only command-line symlinks, and by default to read only devices named on the command line. This is a simple way to get a more-useful behavior when searching random directories; the idea is to use 'find' if you want something fancy. -R acts as before and gets a new alias --dereference-recursive.</i><p>Personally I think breaking compatibility for this change was a poor decision.

The biggest problem I see is: who the heck would expect a .12 release to break compatibility in an ancient and solid piece of software?

Who thought it might be a good idea to break -r (most likely the most often used option) and use the old behaviour for -R?<p>Wouldn't it be better to atleast let -r behave like ever and change -R?<p>Anyone ever used -R here? :)

Another thought: Since rgrep is an alias for grep -r and grep -r has changed, the complete rgrep tool has changed and this can _not_ be fixed by using the "right" switch. Hence rgrep is useless for scripting now.

This is a serious question: Why would you want to use plain old "grep" instead of "ack"[1]? Of course, other than the fact that it's on all machines. Why would you use it instrad of "ack" on your own machines? That's an honest question, I'm not starting a flamewar... The highlighting and filename/line# by default is the killer feature for me.<p>Edit: Come on. Downvotes for this? Honestly... It's HN, not StackOverflow. You don't mark questions as "off-topic" unless they're trolling...<p>[1]: <a href="http://betterthangrep.com" rel="nofollow">http://betterthangrep.com</a>

It's funny how one of the relatively few design errors in Unix shells now indirectly comes back to haunt us. Recursing is built into pretty much every command that can handle multiple files - which very strongly suggests it should have been made a feature of glob (or the shell).<p>I think it's a bit sad that those "big-picture" features in unix are treated as if the were written in stone.

Remember: GNU is <i>not</i> UNIX.

Backwards compatibility is an evil illness that sometimes must be broken. It's for the good of evolution. I praise engineers that make such decisions, even if they are unpopular.

I also decided that sed no longer supports regexes because I said so. And ls -l will now shows a list of print jobs instead of files because maybe that's what you meant. ... oh and ping no longer supports IPv4 because I want everyone to adopt IPv6 immediately because I said so.