The cake, it was a lie [LWN.net]

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 25, 2012 8:57 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: The cake, it was a lie by obi
Parent article: GStreamer 1.0 released

>So you're saying that porting once every 7 (!!) years, is more painful than writing and maintaining the abstraction layer?

Yes, it is. I have 12 year-old games on my computer which I'd very like to be still playable.

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The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 25, 2012 15:37 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (1 responses)

Funny thing is, almost 20yo DOS games that do not play on W7 or even XP are probably playable in DOSbox on Linux :-D

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 25, 2012 16:08 UTC (Tue) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]

DOSBox runs on Windows as well.

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 25, 2012 17:04 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes, it is. I have 12 year-old games on my computer which I'd very like to be still playable.

That is why they are parallel installable. Meaning: that is not a benefit.

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 26, 2012 12:17 UTC (Wed) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link] (3 responses)

Still, it means you have to ship an unsupported version of the library and framework, inclulding possible stability and security issues. I think /real/ backwards compatibility is a lot better than "you can keep the old version somewhere else on disk".

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 26, 2012 21:05 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

I think /real/ backwards compatibility is a lot better than "you can keep the old version somewhere else on disk".

Actually this exactly how you achieve compatibility in most cases. When Microsoft completely redesigned DirectX in it's 10th incarnation they left DirectX dlls in place. When they shipped shiny new Windows 7 they offred MSVCRT.dll compatible with MSVC 6.0 (with some security fixes, of course). And so on.

This is the most practical way to achive compatibility - and the one which Linux Desktop developers explicitly rejected.

Note that this also diciplines developers, too. Hey, I want to bump revision of libfoo from 28 to 29 because I think function names are not clear enough — Sure! Go ahead. Just don't forget that now you'll need to backport all the security patches to all these 28 previous versions. Still want to go forward with that rename?

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 26, 2012 21:48 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (guest, #5198) [Link]

> This is the most practical way to achive compatibility - and the one which Linux Desktop developers explicitly rejected.

This is sadly true, they do this because it does work if you limit the scope to just what ships from the distro you _can_ rebuild the world on a regular basis. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 27, 2012 13:08 UTC (Thu) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link]

In most cases, maybe. KDE offers both ways, keep using old stuff, but new versions will also work.