On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 15:28:02 -0700 Doug Barton <do...@dougbarton.us> articulated:
[snip] This entire thread breaks down to a few simple principals of which the most prominent one is if you are going to become a slave to the past. While one's method may be more circuitous than another's is irrelevant. The final goal is to produce a high quality product. Microsoft realized that they could not produce a more functional version of IE, aka IE9, without abandoning older versions of its OS. They could have went to great lengths to make older and EOL'd versions functional with IE9, but that would have been extremely costly and wasted valuable resources. They simply bit the bullet and moved on. There are several URLs including on Microsoft's own TechNet that you can search for verification. Take for example a user who happens to have a large collection of Disco cloths hanging around his/her home. Should they keep them in some vain hope that Disco will return or simply dispose of them and move on to a newer wardrobe? The point being that at some point you have to move on. Outlook Express is dead. It has been officially abandoned by its creator. Yes, there are still remnants of it in circulation; however, they will all die a natural death soon enough. Heck, there are still users of FreeBSD 4.x lurking around. Would you have the creators of every piece of software out there continuing to waste time and resources on making their software backward compatible? Do you fully realize what a nightmare that would become? It is bad enough when a library version is bumped and I have to rebuild 800+ applications. To continually support this software is to waste time and resources. Many of the complaints from FOSS users is that Microsoft's products are bloated. To continue to support architectures that are no longer viable is to bring the same criticism upon us. Perhaps a possible solution would be to freeze "GNUPG" at its present state of development. Now, start the creation of a new branch that supports only modern, fully RFC approved standards. It might also offer the developers a change to clean up some code, etc. Yes, it would take time, but time well spent I believe. In this way, everybody would be happy. Those wishing to use the older version would be free to do so; while those wanting a more streamlined version would have that opportunity also. It looks like a win-win situation to me. -- Jerry ✌ gnupg.u...@seibercom.net _____________________________________________________________________ Disclaimer: off-list followups get on-list replies or get ignored. Please do not ignore the Reply-To header. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
