> https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12815 - even if that's not a major change grammatically, is a huge change linguistically.

They were renamed because we were constantly forgetting the difference between Ports and Chans. It was a difficult decision choosing the right replacement however. See the huge discussion here: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/11765 At least it was pretty easy to find/replace them, and http://rust-ci.org/ notifies you of any breakages. But yeah, early adoption isn't for the feint-of-heart.