On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:06:36 +0200 Jonas de Buhr <jonas.de.b...@gmx.net> wrote:
> >The only problem with that attitude is that it eventually leads you > >to the same position that Microsoft is in with Windows -- where too > >many years of refusing to drop backwards compatibility were > >completely holding them back. > > i thought of that too. as with many other things, the trick is to find > the right balance. important code changes/cleanups sometimes have to > be made, even if they break things. if that happens too often its > going to annoy the users. Apple had a nice middle ground, most noticeable in MacOSX. Support the old version in a VM-like environment for two releases then drop the support. I think it's a nice compromise. It's unrealistic to support everything you ever did forever like MS tried to do (IE6 is *still* hanging around somehow...), while the other extreme is probably even worse. The current classic extant example is Amarok2 and kmail2 - in both cases the devs seem to have just decided that anyone running anything older than 6 months isn't worth the effort. Well, that's too bad for Amarok and kmail, there's lots of alternative apps for both. And switching apps is far less pain than trying to deal with upgrades with zero supported upgrade paths. These are hard lessons to learn. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
