Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!nuchat!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: yet another 1.4 request
Message-ID: <3984@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 4 Jul 89 02:38:01 GMT
References: <0933.AA0933@caleb> <1989Jun16.151408.8382@ziebmef.uucp> <25963@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 36

In article <25963@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer) writes:
> In article <3973@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
> <Old programs may be broken by links... I know Browser will be. This is
> <not a reason not to implement them... just don't put any on the distribution
> <disks, or ship programs that depend on them for a while.

> The point is that it's not really acceptable to break old programs. On
> the other hand, there may not be much choice about it. The trick is to
> break as few as possible.

Sorry, but it *is* acceptable to break old programs. If you have to break
old programs to provide more functionality, then it's not just acceptable,
it's required. Otherwise you end up with something like MS-DOS.

Old programs broke when people started putting more than 512K in their Amigas,
when they put in 68010s and 68020s, when 1.2 came out, when 1.3 came out, when
the A500 came out, when the A2000 came out, when ExtraHalfBright was shipped,
when people put hard disks in their Amigas, and so on.

Microsoft refused to break old programs, and now MS-DOS is so encrusted with
crud that they're having to throw the whole thing out and start over. They did
better with Xenix, though we're still having to use a System-III based version
because they don't have a SysV version for our hardware... they kept upgrading
the SysIII until now they've forced a major break instead of a gradual upgrade.

1.4 will break stuff. 1.5 will break stuff. In 2.0 they get to break everything
:->.

Back to the point. When I say "old programs will be broken", I'm talking about
a few old programs (ones that do tree-walks), and there will be a simple
workaround (don't do directory links up the tree). And no matter how you
implement links, backup and directory-listing programs will have to be
updated.
-- 
Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva      `-_-'
...texbell!sugar!peter, or peter@sugar.hackercorp.com  'U`