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:
2006-02-15
You say you have to *often* recompile your application several time for each FC. Now you tell me recompiling the dependancies that need recompiling *once* and for all is more work?
Which part of "backport" did you fail to understand?
If it were a matter of recompilation only, it wouldn't be an issue. It's an issue when moving the new stuff back to the old distro requires backporting rather than simple recompilation.
My Linux OS (all of them) are recompiled from source, so I know the matter pretty well, and I even fail to see what dependancies would need so much work as what you're saying.
It is obvious that you are looking at this from the perspective of an individual who has full control over the resources they utilize, rather than from the view of an organization which has to deal with real world constraints.
Your failure to see a problem makes that problem no less real for those of us who deal with it.
Binary compatibility makes managing such situations less difficult as does backwards compatibility.