Euphemism of the day: restoring backward compatibility

Today somebody from IBM did the following commit on the Axiom project:

-        } else if ("com.ibm.ws.prereq.banshee".equals(symbolicName)) {
+        } else if ("IBM".equals(symbolicName)) {

I gently pointed out that the change looks strange and is probably a mistake (symbolicName and vendor are attributes extracted from an OSGi bundle manifest):

Shouldn’t this be "IBM".equals(vendor) instead of "IBM".equals(symbolicName)???

Shortly afterwards, a new commit:

-        } else if ("IBM".equals(symbolicName)) {
+        } else if ("IBM".equals(vendor) || "com.ibm.ws.prereq.banshee".equals(symbolicName)) {

Guess what was the commit comment?

Need to insure that the dialect detector remains backwards compatible

So, if you don’t want to say “I fixed a bug that I introduced”, just say “I restored backward compatibility”…

PS: That reminds me of the story where IBM tried to hide the fact that the first version of their StAX parser didn’t conform to the StAX specifications. Maybe I will blog about this story some day.