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> There used to be one Linux, one BSD, and a couple of Windows / DOS. Mac was probably around too And AIX of several releases. And HP/UX. And SGI Irix. And Sol
by dozzie 11y ago
> There used to be one Linux, one BSD, and a couple of Windows / DOS. Mac was probably around too
And AIX of several releases. And HP/UX. And SGI Irix. And Solaris + SunOS,
again, of several releases (mostly backward compatible, though).
Don't say it was easier then than it is today, barring the young guns
constantly breaking their new Node.js packages and Ruby gems.
- 3pt14159 11y agoYeah but everything is online right now and we're moving more and more data that _must_ be secured. Back then you really only cared about a couple of platforms - nobody cared if you could hack some random dudes garage or phone.
- snuxoll 11y agoEven then, who cares. Software developers didn't have to explicitly support BSD, if there was a BSD user who cared enough they'd work on getting your package in the ports tree. If there was a Debian or Red Hat user that cared enough they'd make a .deb or .rpm. None of this has changed, what HAS changed is library and application developers deciding to say "screw people using existing releases, I'm only putting bugfixes and security updates in the newest release so anyone still using 1.x and caring about stability can sod off". I package software I care about, but libraries in particular are notorious for not maintaining any semblance of ABI or API compatibility even between minor releases these days. It's increasingly difficult to support this when I have to rebuild or update multiple applications that depend on a library because they decided to make huge breaking changes in a point release or they won't provide any bugfixes for the major release I'm still on.