Reverse Compatibility Manifesto

[William M. Quarles]

OK, so I said the phrase "Windows XP" in a message, and suddenly NO ONE 
will reply? Seriously, I'll say it again, Microsoft and Sony (e.g. most 
of the PlayStation series) can do reverse compatibility fairly well, and 
Fedora is almost totally lacking in that arena. "Get with the times" 
doesn't always make sense. And if anybody says, "Well, if you like 
reverse compatibility so much, why don't you shell out for Microsoft 
software like 90% of the rest of the herd." Uh, no. There are both 
commercial and "free" software products that need that reverse 
compatibility.

Example: is there anybody out there doing natural science or engineering 
on Linux machines right now who is NOT using any commercial software 
whatsoever?

And just because a "free" software product hasn't been updated in a 
while does not mean that the software is useless.

I can't quadruple boot my machine just to run all of the software I use. 
It should not be necessary, especially when most of this software is 
designed for Red Hat/Fedora distributions, or can be installed and run 
using WINE.

Any thoughts?

William

William M. Quarles wrote:
> Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Upstreams still building their binaries with GCC 2.95 (or 2.96 for 
>> that matter) should really be told to get with the times. GCC is at 
>> 4.3 now, 2.95 is just a long gone memory from the distant past.
> 
> Sorry for taking so long to reply, for some reason my Gmane.org feed 
> wasn't showing the latest replies on this thread.
> 
> OK, Windows XP still runs nearly all programs from previous versions 
> Windows, plus it has DOS emulation so that it can run many, but not all 
> DOS programs. What is SO WRONG with some element of reverse 
> compatibility? I know that some of you may feel that there is a hinder 
> to progress there, but there has to be some kind of balance between 
> bleeding-edge and interoperability with other software.
> 
> I'm not talking about a need to build new binaries, I'm just talking 
> about getting older software to run on a newer OS. This doesn't just 
> include commercial software such as Maple, but also older open-source 
> projects that haven't been updated in a while, but could still 
> hypothetically work if the proper libraries were provided.
> 
> William
>