Massimo, others, any opinions on
https://github.com/web2py/pydal/issues/480#issuecomment-330273607.
To me this looks like a break of backward compatibility (I don't see the old behavior as a bug -- it's just that we now prefer the new behavior).
Even if we believe the old behavior constitutes a bug, that doesn't mean all usages of the functionality in existing apps were therefore buggy and will be corrected by this change. Rather, this change could well be introducing bugs into apps that were functioning perfectly well before the change (it broke at least one user's functioning code). Therefore, if we're going to make changes like this, we should at least document the changes and warn users to make sure they update their app code when updating the framework.
Anthony