In a blog post two months ago you said, "I've taken the decision..." https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration
There was clearly someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken.
Why is this important? Well, for example, it seems that the RSS feed was already broken when this important announcement was posted: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to...
They were my decisions based on all the data I had, including launching with what we had.
re: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" this was posted on the old infrastructure and should have been in your RSS feeds up until late last week when our migration happened - so for just under a month... I can check more to make sure what I am saying is correct, but the migration only happened last week.
• The people working on web.dev decided to migrate to a common Google site platform, so that they could focus on content rather than maintaining an ad-hoc infrastructure,
• That platform happens not to support RSS (yet), so they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, creating the https://developer.chrome.com/feeds info page acknowledging the issue, and even creating unofficial feeds.
You could phrase this as “someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken”, but relative to the big decision of whether to spend effort maintaining your own custom infrastructure or just focus on the content, the presence or absence of RSS support is probably just not a big factor.
[One could imagine a culture of "never migrate to a new system unless it fully supports every single functionality of the old system", but that (just like "never launch a product/feature unless you're confident you're going to support it forever") is simply not in Google's culture, where there are always ongoing migrations between "the old system that is deprecated and the new system that is not ready yet" — but that is "just" a cultural problem rather than anyone consciously deciding that RSS could be broken.]
This is a false dichotomy. I wasn't questioning the decision to migrate platforms, I was questioning "the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling".
> there are always ongoing migrations between "the old system that is deprecated and the new system that is not ready yet" — but that is "just" a cultural problem rather than anyone consciously deciding that RSS could be broken.
I disagree, because whenever you migrate, some features are considered essential and others inessential. Someone consciously decided that RSS was among the inessential features in this specific case. The "culture" did not make that specific decision.
This is the developer relations team. How can you have relations with developers when they don't even see your announcements? The essential part is the communication with outside developers, not the internal CMS.
> they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, creating the https://developer.chrome.com/feeds info page acknowledging the issue, and even creating unofficial feeds.
How were developers supposed to know any of this? I had no idea until now.
And yes, in the decision between "keep maintaining a custom infrastructure" and "switch to a common infrastructure", someone must have decided that RSS support is not an essential feature whose lack should block (or indefinitely postpone) the migration; this seems reasonable and what my previous post was about, including the "probably just not a big factor" bit you quoted above. It looks like they're planning to add this support though.
There was production breakage! The RSS feeds broke. That's the entire point of this HN submission and discussion.
> Once you've decided a couple of months earlier to do a migration, doing it "before the freeze" is also a natural deadline to pick, for migrating to the new infrastructure
Why? Migrations almost always break stuff, right? So why would you break stuff when "a lot of people are on vacation" and thus can't fix the breakage? It seems to me the natural and logical choice would be to wait until after the new year to migrate. What sense does it make to break stuff and then go on vacation?
> RSS support is not an essential feature whose lack should block (indefinitely postpone) the migration; this seems natural (especially if you think you can add it back in a few weeks / months)
It's interesting that you say "indefinitely" postpone but then turn around right away and say "a few weeks/ months".
