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