Tell HN: GitHub broke feeds for individual commits
4 comments
It appears you can still make it return an Atom feed if you pass the 'Accept: application/xml' header.
This is not to say that what they did was right.
This is not to say that what they did was right.
Good find. But while that may serve as a workaround for scripts, it still doesn’t work for RSS Readers (the ones I tried), which makes sense because feeds can be JSON¹ too but these don‘t conform to that format either.
¹ https://www.jsonfeed.org
¹ https://www.jsonfeed.org
If we append .atom:
We can now subscribe to be notified of releases in an RSS reader.
This used to work for the commit history of individual files. Let’s say we wanted to be notified for changes to Homebrew’s python alias. First we’d open the commit history page:
Then append .atom:
Except now it returns JSON output. Not only does this prevent checking for changes to individual files in an RSS reader, the extension is misleading. If you have any scripts that parse the feed or are tracking changes to any file in an RSS reader, those are now broken.