----- Original Message ----- | On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 5:17 PM, James A. Peltier <jpeltier at sfu.ca> | wrote: | > | | > | It's technology, not fashion. If the 'new' breaks old documented | > | processes it isn't moving forward, it is just different. If it | > | is | > | really better, it should easily maintain backwards compatibility. | > | | | > My case is that the new fashion has been that way for years as | > deemed by the Upstream Provider. If the end user that being us | > admins, can't keep up with the vendors way of doing this then we | > should be sysadmins. | | And my case is that things that don't maintain backwards | compatibility | for arbitrary reasons waste other people's time unnecessarily and are | thus philosophically evil. The details don't matter much. People | should be able to reuse their work. | | -- | Les Mikesell | lesmikesell at gmail.com Deprecation >From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In the process of authoring computer software, its standards or documentation, or other technical standards, deprecation is a status applied to features, characteristics, or practices to indicate that they should be avoided, typically because they have been superseded. Although deprecated software features remain in the software, their use may raise warning messages recommending alternative practices, and deprecation may indicate that the feature will be removed in the future. Features are deprecated—rather than immediately removed—in order to provide backward compatibility, and give programmers who have used the feature enough time to bring their code into compliance with the new standard. vconfig was deprecated in RHEL 6. It's a simple as that. In fact the use of vconfig began to be discouraged back in 2005. They do not need to support deprecated methods for ever. If 6 years of of documentation states to not use vconfig and instead use ip commands instead aren't enough, what is? Listen, there's tons of code out there that use old implementations of C ifdef's that I have had to fix because newer compilers no longer support them. I support software for a living and so I know it hard work, but people need to keep up. There's a reason we don't all write all our code in assembler. There are better tools for the job today. -- James A. Peltier Manager, IT Services - Research Computing Group Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus Phone : 778-782-6573 Fax : 778-782-3045 E-Mail : jpeltier at sfu.ca Website : http://www.sfu.ca/itservices http://blogs.sfu.ca/people/jpeltier Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life but as by the obstacles they have overcome. - Booker T. Washington