On Mon, December 29, 2014 21:04, Warren Young wrote: > On Dec 29, 2014, at 4:03 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com> wrote: >>> >>> the world where you design, build, and deploy The System is disappearing >>> fast. >> >> Sure, if you don't care if you lose data, you can skip those steps. > > How did you jump from incremental feature roll-outs to data loss? There is no > necessary connection there. > Having written the Cucumber Backgrounder guide I believe that I am well aware of some of the current fashions in software development. The idea of incremental feature enhancement that you introduced is at once orthogonal to my original point and yet forms an ironic counterpoint that highlights the problem. The issue of data integrity is a separate matter entirely. I raised the issues of needless incompatibility and the avoidable costs of retraining and re-implementation of existing, satisfactory, solutions. You reply with a comment extolling incremental featurism. I am all in favour of incrementalism in software development. The problem being that RedHat does not do that. Instead RedHat freezes the product two years before release and then sets about creating a new, equivalent, but significantly different, replacement that you are forced to accept every seven years. In fact, the freeze, release, support and deprecate schedule that RedHat embraces as a corporate policy bears more than a passing similarity to the 'waterfall' process you, evidently prematurely, consigned to the grave. If RedHat actually adopted incremental rollout of new features to their distribution I would be most happy because, incremental rollouts are NOT SUPPOSED TO BREAK ANYTHING ALREADY IN PRODUCTION. And that condition is most certainly not met in every case of RHELx+1 I have dealt with. -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrne mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3