I don't think the TIP has the idea of ruling common sense, at least not to my knowledge. And if I'm not mistaken, the OCT has to agree to reverting the commit rights (not an automatic behaviour). I'm not even in favour of beeing very drastic here. But at least the awareness has to be risen, that you cannot just change the API, especially if you know it might break existing code. How do you know ?
- You remove a parameter
- You change the way the parameter is beeing used in a not obvious way (e.g. if you suddenly decide to user first_names as the container for the birthdate).
- You change the return values (number / order)
And this is why I said, if in doubt, just announce it. The commiter might not be aware of it, or too overworked to notice (we are humans. Humans are prone to make error). Therefore I absolutly second Dirks request for a CVS diff mailinglist. It has helped us internally tremendously so far and prevents serious mistakes to get into the code (and teaches a little bit of coding style and commit comments).
