On Friday, December 17, 2010 10:55:58 am Les Mikesell wrote:
On 12/17/10 8:18 AM, Peter Kjellström wrote:
Longevity (things continue to work without breakage for a long time): This kind of implies "don't keep stuff continously updated to recent versions" don't you think?
It could work that way if the upstream developers of the thousands of included projects understood the need for backwards compatibility to keep things working. They don't.
In some cases the breakage is intentional. In others, components become unmaintained, or worse. Case in point: way back in KDE 1.x or 2.x days I made up some documents in KWord that included some embedded diagrams using a component included in that old KDE but not in newer KDE. Result? While KWord opens the files ok, there are no longer any embedded diagrams.
So I actually keep a really old Linux dist (Mandrake 5.3, or maybe Red Hat 6.2; can't remember at the moment, been too long) around just in case I need to open one of those files; none of the export choices in KWord of that day include the ability to export the diagrams, and I just haven't had time to convert the diagrams (it's been a long time since I needed one of those anyway, long enough that I forget the name of the component....argh....).