On 12/17/10 11:11 AM, Peter Kjellström wrote:
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.
While fine in theory this wouldn't work in real life since they would have to be backwards compatible not only for their official features but also for bugs/quirks/unintended features.
So even if those thousands of upstream projects managed to remain (from their perspective) perfectly backwards compatible things would still break.
Not to mention the need to break backwards compatibility once in a while to move projects along (read: major versions).
That 'need' kind of depends on how bad your original interface designs were. How much has the kernel needed to break from either Posix or the SysVr4 spec?