On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 09:09:53PM -0400, John Thacker wrote: > They used VMWare and NVidia drivers that didn't work on kernel 2.6. I think it's a gross exageration to compare such an speciality app with one that uses the standard toolkit. Even windows broke such apps as VMWare, and nobody complained. But regular apps written to the standard toolkit still work on Windows 15+ years later. Besides, VMWare and NVidia make use of internal stuff that is *explicitly* off limits. Linus doesn't break *exported* interfaces. He is a man of his word, one can say. Similarly, we shouldn't break our exported interfaces. > Similarly, we expected people to have to do > export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5, etc., because their old apps (like > acroread4) wouldn't work otherwise. That seems pretty hard for a newbie > to figure out; I've had to tell people about it. They don't like > their apps suddenly breaking on upgrade. And users have a right to be pissed. It's our failure that we did broke their apps, we shouldn't look at that for inspiration. If anything, we should avoid it like the plague. Look, I've been using Linux for 10 years. I love it, I'm a hard core user and developer. I don't use it because stuff breaks. We can do without that nonsense. Linus 'gets it', why can't we? -- Dimi.
