Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 15th Jan 2007 11:25 UTC
Ian Murdock blogs about the importance of backward compatibility. "Yes, it's hard, particularly in the Linux world, because there are thousands of developers building the components that make up the platform, and it just takes one to break compatibility and make our lives difficult. Even worse, the idea of keeping extraneous stuff around for the long term 'just' for the sake of compatibility is anathema to most engineers. Elegance of design is a much higher calling than the pedestrian task of making sure things don't break. Why is backward compatibility important?"
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Member since:
2005-07-15
On the plus side for Linux BSD etc. the freedom from implementing backwards compatibility gives a lot more coding freedom for improvements.
Actually FreeBSD maintains ABI compatibility through each major release. Additionally, you can run stuff from previous releases with no issues. I recently ran a full userland from 4.x on a 5.5 system with no hiccups, and then a 5.5 userland on a 6.2 system.
This also works well for stuff distributed in binary form like RAID management tools, old versions of Real Server and Oracle, etc.