ISSUE SUMMARY
In 2.4 the geoNear command returned the distance in radians for legacy coordinate pairs. In 2.6, this behavior changed and the geoNear command returned the result in meters. This behavior change was unintentional and needs to be reverted.
USER IMPACT
Users that have their data stored in legacy coordinate pairs (rather than in GeoJSON format) and who use the geoNear command get the results back in an unexpected unit, which may break their applications.
WORKAROUNDS
A client-side rescaling of the result back from meters to radians can be used as a workaround.
RESOLUTION
Revert the behavior change and return the result in radians again if the coordinates are stored in legacy format.
AFFECTED VERSIONS
Version 2.6.0 was affected by this bug.
PATCHES
The patch is included in the 2.6.1 production release.
Original description
It seems that the distance metric for handling legacy points has changed from mongodb 2.4.x to 2.6.0.
Previously the distance in geoNear queries for legacy points was returned as radians - since 2.6.0 it is now returned in meters. Since this behaviour is not listed in the incompatibility / changes list and could be seen as a breaking change I suppose that this is a bug.
See also here:
https://jira.spring.io/browse/DATAMONGO-906