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....).