3 ms·
Providing each year is a higher number than last year, why does it make it incompatible?
by Daviey 8y ago
Providing each year is a higher number than last year, why does it make it incompatible?
- morganvachon 8y agoWe had a turn of the century during Linux's life span, 1999-2000, which coincidentally was going to be a problem because so many computer systems used a two digit year.
- blixt 8y agoSo we have 80 years to solve the issue of supporting the version going from 99.X to 2100.1 :)
- ehnto 8y agoNow double that estimate, add some padding, and I am looking forward to the release of 2230.1
- giancarlostoro 8y agoThrow in Windows XP becoming sentient and recreating the Windows Subsystem for Linux equivalent for Linux itself.
- thruhiker 8y agoGood god man. What dark beasts lie in you.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI find it ridiculous people still cling to XP and IE, just wanted to poke fun. :)
- _shadi 8y agospoken like a true project manager
- Daviey 8y agoBut a 4 digit year as a version is ok, right?
- majewsky 8y agoIt just breaks existing regexes. When the kernel switched from 2.6.x.y to 3.x.y, it broke a lot of shoddy scripts that expected the version number to match e.g. /^\d\.\d\.\d\.\d$/
- justaj 8y agoAre kernel maintainers responsible for shoddy scripts though?
- syntheticcdo 8y agoLinus has the (imho: valid) expectation that kernel changes should not break userspace (for detailed explanation see: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/235532 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/235532). Even if the version numbering is not an explicit API like say, file system drivers, the versioning of the kernel is an implicit guarantee that the kernel has made to userspace.
- azeirah 8y agoAt some point, I think so. It's similar to a discussion I saw on here about Chrome adding a feature that you could use with a certain html attribute iirc, ie <div newattribute> or something. Supposedly, nobody should have an attribute called 'newattribute' anywhere in their application, but that doesn't mean that there are is a non-zero amount of applications out there that do. The problem is not so much that you can point and laugh at the crappy regexes, or crappy html-devs, the problem is that some scripts on some server, or some sites somewhere don't really have a maintainer anymore. For tiny, tiny projects, you don't really have to take this into account, but if you're Chrome or the Linux kernel, you definitely should take it into account.