On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 1:40 AM, Bry8 Star <bry8star@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> If ALL new apps/libs starts to change their API without backward
> compatibility, then, definitely updating/upgrading core/base apps
> would cause domino effect, like you have pointed out. Various apps
> and libs are inter-dependent & inter-connected with each others.
If libs and apps always maintained backwards compatibility, there
wouldn't be much need for 'enterprise' distributions. They don't.
> But do all ALL apps, or, libs do really change ALL of their API set ?
> My understanding is, some new APIs are added for new features, and
> older same API gets more refined, and/or newer query or response
> parameters are added behind the old existing query/response.
That is very much up to the respective developers. But eventually
just about everything that isn't a published standard will change.
Even the C language that underlies just about everything on the system
has changed over the years.
> If they(developers) purposefully does not honor backward
> compatibility handling in their app/lib, that is kind of like,
> forcing people to buy new computer/hardware for new Windows8.
It is the nature of youth to believe that everything older than you
are was done wrong, sometimes even just older than the last book you
read. Sometimes even the same developer decides his own earlier work
was done wrong - and in that case he is something of an authority
regardless of the pain it causes the users. Sometimes they just
can't come up with a way to add needed functionality without changing
behavior - like perl5 starting to interpolate @ in double-quoted
strings. But 'enterprise' linux distributions put a huge effort
into marshaling the wild and crazy changes (like you'd see in
fedora...) into compatible batches at major version releases.
> Why apps/libs are getting bigger in src or in their binary size ?
> with what ! ?
People keep writing more code - and never agree on shared libraries or
languages. But look at this in terms of the cost of the disk and RAM
to hold them and you'll see that it is really going down so fast that
nobody cares.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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