Nick Hilliard wrote: > > Martin Rex wrote: > > > >>>While I do have OpenOffice on about half of my dozen computing environments, > [...] > > Correct. "Upgrading" an installation takes me a full week until it > > works as smoothly as the original working environment. I don't have > > more than one week per year available for such waste. > > Ok, so let me get this right: 12 computing environments, all of which are > out of date by at least 3 years, and you can only afford one week every > year for managing updates - which is enough time to update exactly one > installation. And because of this awkward situation you find yourself in, > you feel that the IETF should hold off supporting a 5 year old file format, > supported by the majority of computers in the world? What is much more important is that the data formats used by the IETF will still be fully supported in 15-20 years. For a new, and more so a proprietary data format, it takes at least 5 years to figure out whether it is widely adopted and will be supported at least 15-20 years into the future. None of my working environments is actually out of date -- or they would not be working environments. Our customers are actually paying a lot of money to get our software supported on platforms for more than 10 years (2-3 years in development plus 10 years in full support, and a few more years). The code that I develop (middleware stuff: gss-api,tls,pkix,cms) is compiled for a variety of platforms (SunOS 5.8-5.11, AIX 4.3.3-6.1, HP-UX 11.0-11.31, Linux SLES 7-11, OS/390 10.00-20.00, MS Windows 5.0-6.1, plus a few that we will discontinue end of 2013, including OSF/1.) Home and Laptop is 3xWinXP,Linux-32,Linux-64,Win7-64 At work it is XP,XP-64,SunOS,Linux-32,Linux-64,Win7-32 Every data or file format that I can use on only a small subset of my work environments in a royal PITA to deal with. PDF is OK, PPT is bad, PPTX is horrible. -Martin _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf