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Do you happen to know Linus' "first rule of kernel development"? "If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame
by zaptheimpaler 4y ago
Do you happen to know Linus' "first rule of kernel development"?
"If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the
kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to
understand?" - from his famous rant [1]
So Linux prioritizes backwards compat as well. It would be insane for any project relied on by half the computing world not to. MS just throwing out their registry and rewriting it would probably break a million programs and possibly break literal billions of people's computers in some way. Its a universal problem - the more dependants any piece of code has, the harder it is to change.
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
- pjmlp 4y agoWhich is a reason no one has deep knowledge about all the ioctl variants out there on Linux, as new ones get introduced, sometimes to work around backwards compatibility guarantees.
- jollybean 4y ago"It would be insane for any project relied on by half the computing world not to." I think this is insane and narrow minded. I suggest there should be 'eras' of version where things do change. If they make OS changes, notify early, prepare basic materials, create 'auto-updaters' and allow a few years for change. But it needs to be done.