Robin Laing wrote:
I've heard of the project before, but can't put my finger on
anything that the
current version provides that couldn't have been done with backwards
compatibility as Solaris has done. Instead we've had a decade of slow
and painful changes to new and more or less arbitrary locations.
(/opt is
in one year, /srv the next...)
This is an interesting issue as my upgrade to FC6 pointed out an issue
with standards. Where I work, we use some NFS mounts and part of that
is what is mounted in /opt. The powers in charge have decided that
/opt is now a network mount. Oops, I had installed my local programs
into /opt as I have done and been told to for ages and even the FHS
isn't clear.
I think /opt was originally conceived as a place for vendor or third
party packages
that were not part of the base distribution.
As for backward compatibility. Do we want to be backward capable for
8 bit, 16 bit or 32 bit? What about Internationalization? How about
Terabyte harddrives and multi-gig files, do we not support these?
Yes, but don't you think any system capable of supporting the next
advance on one
of these fronts can easily also continue to run and be compatible with
anything
you had before.
At some point in time, the past has to be dumped and we have to move
forward.
Yes, you will probably want to replace your apps. One at at time.
Maybe one
a year.
This is as good as time as any.
It is as bad a time as any, too. The reason you want to replace old
apps is to
correct the mistakes in them. How sure are you that you won't just replace
them with new mistakes?
64 bit processors are almost the norm today. It is time to look at
the changes necessary to support this but also take the time and make
the effort to look at the future and plan for 128 bit processors.
Lets not forget the headaches of Y2K and all those people and
applications that are still stuck in the 32 bit world. (Flash).
Correctly written programs had no problem with Y2K. Correctly written
32 bit
programs do not have 2 gig file limits and run correctly on 64bit
systems that
provide backwards compatibility.
In this day and age, I can have 6000 or 7000 files in a directory but
I cannot copy or work on these files due to limits within the kernel
from days gone bye.
That's not an inherent limitation or something that happened because of
age. There
were filesystems capable of handling many files years ago. But, such a
problem
points out that you might want to be able to run your current programs (that
perhaps your business depends on and can't be replaced) on a new and
updated operating system.
I am not a developer but I keep reading about the headaches that
trying to maintain backwards compatibility and meeting the needs for
the future. As I see it, with Fedora, there is not backwards
compatibility from last year as FC4 is now toast.
It's not a universal problem.
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/campaign_docs/expertexchange/knowledge/solaris_security_compat.html#4
Perhaps that's too much to ask from a free OS, though.
If there is a standard that most of the Linux versions or the key
versions follow, then the developers don't have to customize their
application for each distribution. This isn't an easy undertaking but
is necessary.
Why do we have standards, to make things work together. It is that
simple.
And the nice thing about them is that there are so many to choose from.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
