[CentOS] two cents or not two cents

Fri Dec 17 17:11:10 UTC 2010
Peter Kjellström <cap at nsc.liu.se>

On Friday, December 17, 2010 04:55:58 pm 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.

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).

/Peter
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