Has Red Hat helped or hurt?

Christian Tanzer tanzer at swing.co.at
Fri May 10 03:02:17 EDT 2002


Paul Rubin <phr-n2002a at nightsong.com> wrote:

> tanzer at swing.co.at (Christian Tanzer) writes:
> > > It's an error to needlessly break compatibility with it.
> >
> > And it's FUD to claim needless compatibility breaks have happened.
>
> How is it FUD?  Are you saying the compatibility breaks were needed?
> If not, they were needless.

There were a few breakages between 1.5.2 and 2.x. IMHO, none were
gratuitous.

But you continue to rant about breakages without supplying any
evidence of where it really mattered to you. In particular, IIRC you
always talk about breaks where the code was made consistent with the
documentation (e.g., list.append) or an obsolete module was removed
(e.g., rand). I don't consider such issues `needless`. If you really
want to use a language with lots of accumulated cruft you probably
know where to find one.

OTOH, Many Python users were pleasantly surprised that they weren't
hit by any major issues. You obviously never migrated from Perl 4 to 5
<wink>.

Citing Red Hat to argue about compatibility breaks doesn't lend weight
to your argument either, considering how they messed around with gcc.

-- 
Christian Tanzer                                         tanzer at swing.co.at
Glasauergasse 32                                       Tel: +43 1 876 62 36
A-1130 Vienna, Austria                                 Fax: +43 1 877 66 92






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