Tell HN: GitHub broke feeds for individual commits

[itbroke]

We can append .atom to certain GitHub URLs to get a feed for that page. For example, this is the releases page for Homebrew:

    https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/releases

If we append .atom:

    https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/releases.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:

    https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commits/master/Aliases/python

Then append .atom:

    https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commits/master/Aliases/python.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.

[cyfex]

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.

[itbroke]

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

[tapper]

Hi any way to ask github to fix this?

[CaramelRaisins]

It seems to be fixed now.