3 ms·
> Are you going to patch it to decade old binaries? How are you going to handle that Wordperfect from 1998? The same way Apple handles a PowerPC-compiled appli
by alpaca128 6y ago
> Are you going to patch it to decade old binaries? How are you going to handle that Wordperfect from 1998?
The same way Apple handles a PowerPC-compiled application from 1998.
By incrementing to a new major version number, and stating in
the changelog that users are free to keep running the older
version if their software won't be patched.
Does Wayland provide a better solution than that? No, and in
addition it also breaks a lot of newer applications. We don't
need to do a lot of math to figure out more people would miss
Xorg than Wordperfect.
- vetinari 6y ago> The same way Apple handles a PowerPC-compiled application from 1998. It doesn't handle them at all. There was a transition mechanism, to get users updated, but it wasn't maintained long term. You could not run PowerPC binaries from 1998 in 2005. Apple expected their users to update the binaries for new architecture in the long term. In many cases, not only ISA and ABI changed, APIs too; good luck if your application used Quickdraw. (Yes, I still do have coasters in the basement). So compared to that, Wayland's Xwayland is too nice and too longterm.