This attitude leaves the project hamstrung with old misfeatures. Sometimes externally-visible functionality isn&#x27;t outright broken, but badly designed in some way, like exhibiting a nonsensical corner case or whatever. People &quot;out there&quot; depend on that behavior, though. Their scripts might break if it is changed. You really want to fix it.<p>There are ways forward, like supporting a backwards compatibility mode which emulates the old behavior. For instance --emulate-version=6 could make version 7 behave like 6 with regard to changes like this. At some point, you cut off support for --emulate-version values of 6; the program then fails with a message saying &quot;Version 17 can only emulate quirks from version 8 and newer.&quot; and bail.<p>If people want the old behavior, they can use an older version of the program.