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So to some extent this just reflects my prior ‘commitment’ (it doesn't feel like one at this point, because it follows from many, many preferences about what I

• badsectoracula 7y ago
  Honestly i do not think that bundling everything to a container is really a solution - more of a hacky workaround for a problem that shouldn't exist. It does solve the "old program doesn't run" issue, but doesn't solve anything else. For example your old program doesn't receive new features through the shared libraries it uses - a simple example i gave elsewhere was old Windows applications receiving the ability to input emoji in recent updates to Windows 10 even though emoji wasn't a thing (outside Japan at least) when most of them were written. It also doesn't solve the issue at all from the developer's side. A developer who comes later to an application still has to find old development libraries and make sure they work on his modern system and/or update all the code (perhaps without even knowing how the original program worked). And developers who maintain an application still have to waste time and resources in keeping up (see Xfce as an example). FLOSS doesn't really solve this - if anything your average (big) distro repository is full of programs using several different "versions" of toolkits and other APIs. At "best" (from the distro maintainers perspective, not necessarily form the users' perspective) the distro drops applications. It does help with having the potential of fixing things, but that is all that there is to it - the actual effort (and thus time) needed largely depends on how much things have broken. As a personal example, a few years ago i decided to try one of the very first web browsers made, MidasWWW. I downloaded the code and tried to compile it. But of course it didn't compile out of the box, having the source wasn't much of a help here. Now, i am a bit persistent, so i decided to fix it and after a while i ended up with this: https://i.imgur.com/W37vhBW.png https://i.imgur.com/W37vhBW.png This is an example of what i mentioned in my comments here: the browser was written in Motif and Motif has generally been API and ABI stable over the years (it'd be nice if its theming support was improved - without breaking backwards compatibility of course - as i think that would make it more popular among developers) so i didn't had to do almost anything. But at the same time MidasWWW was written in some old Unix workstation that had a modified version of Motif which was incompatible with the mainline Motif - the result is the panel at the top being inside the content area instead of on top of it. I didn't knew about that, i actually realized after i made that shot :-P and i couldn't fix it because i am not really familiar with Motif and especially not familiar with the modified version that the workstation used - but i'd need to at least know something from both to figure out what changes i need to make. And see, that was just a little breaking incompatibility between versions. Having access to the source and Motif being backwards compatible helped to get it compiling, but didn't help with having it work properly because there was a breaking change somewhere in between. And since the original developers aren't around, it was up to me alone to figure things out - to do it properly, i'd have to spend considerable time. Time that i didn't want to bother spending, so i didn't :-P