On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 07:02:25PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote: > LD_ASSUME_KERNEL was an absolute usability disaster, it's not something > anyone should be pointing to as justification. Threading really was > not a bottleneck on most peoples systems, and it would have made much more > sense for NPTL to be opt-in, instead of opt-out. > > The end result of stuff like this is that all the good work projects like > GNOME have done gets thrown away, because the moment Joe User wants to run > a cool game or their mission critical app, they have to dick > about with the command line setting obscure meaningless variables that you > Just Have To Know. And the end result of making things like NPTL opt-in is that really broken things never get fixed, because those old binaries using broken things are still lying around. There's an entire continuum along the way of doing things, and there are certainly tradeoffs involved either way. Since most of the ill effects of doing things the Linux way (and the RedHat way) of making incompatible changes in order to discard cruft both fall hardest on non Free Software and non Open Source Software and on less technical users, it is unsurprising that Linux distributions are much more likely to behave this way than Windows, being both inherently more hostile to closed binaries and with a more technically savvy user communitiy. (It is, I think, worth pointing out that even an average user has no problems provided that he stays with Free Software.) While I certainly do not blame you for wanting a different balance in your approach, I disagree with your opinion as I place a different value on fixing broken things versus compatibility. While it is unreconcilable, luckily you and others are free to create a distribution which does take backwards compatibility more seriously. (Or use the many other operating systems that take a hardline approach towards backwards compatibility at the expense of fixing things.) I respect your differing opinion and recognize the tradeoffs involved, but still prefer things the way that they have been done. No invocation of "but we're a *platform* now" is likely to make me change my mind. John Thacker
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