Consider the following <item/> from an RSS 2.0 feed:

<item>
<title>Revision 492 by blalor</title>
<pubDate>Wed, 29 Dec 2004 19:26:18 GMT</pubDate>
<author>blalor@you_know_where.com</author>
<description disable-output-escaping="yes"><div style="white-space:pre">re-worked build.xml to use ant-entities for imports</div><br/>
(<em>Wed, 29 Dec 2004 19:26:18 GMT</em>)<br/><br/>
<table>
<tr><td><strong>Modified</strong></td>
<td>&nbsp;<a href="http://that.server.com:8181/svn/bucket/ldap/trunk/build.xml&quot;&gt;/ldap/trunk/build.xml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;
/tr> </table>
</description>
</item>

There is no <link/> element. The RSS macro still generates a link, however, and that link looks like:
<a href="$item.link">Revision 492 by blalor</a>

Looks like that <a/> tag needs to be wrapped in an if.