Interesting. I wanted to mention that IO::Socket made a similar change which was wrapped above and below with NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE The documented change was As of VERSION 1.18 all IO::Socket objects have autoflush turned on by default. This was not the case with earlier releases.

The current version's 1.31, and 1.20 (the earliest release on CPAN) was July 23, 1998, so 1.18 was probably about 15 years ago -- but that message is still there. Nice.

However, with all due respect to Andy Lester, I agree with your point -- I think it's wrong for a module to break existing code, notwithstanding that seat belts are indeed an excellent idea.