On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 08:40:17AM -0500, Robert J. Hansen wrote: >> Why? Just because new (perhaps incompatible) features are added in >> newer versions,... nobody has to use that newer versions, right? > > If you put GnuPG 3.0 available for download, everyone who's looking for the > latest release will grab it. The people who are quite happy with 1.2, 1.4 > or 2.0 won't. > > Now imagine that 3.0 breaks backwards compatibility. > > Anarchy ensues. A lot of your users can't talk to each other. Most of > them don't know why. "I'm using GnuPG 3.0, I don't know why it can't talk > to PGP 5.0, I mean, GnuPG 2.0 could...!" > > Ensuring a migration path is so critically important in software > engineering. Breaking backwards compatibility is seen as an extreme step.
It is frequently commented on, and not just in a tongue in cheek manner, that it is a shame that the earlier versions of PGP weren't broken. If the old stuff had been broken, we would have no reason to maintain compatibility with it. David _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
