Re: Get rid of them

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
Sat, 23 Aug 1997 02:32:27 -0700 (PDT)

> On 22 Aug 1997, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> > I would suggest not to, since it would introduce yet another
> > incompatibility. In fact, I would highly vote against this change;
> > making them a config option I can see (or dependent on a.out support)
> > but backward compatibility is important for people living in the real
> > world...
>
> Oh man. If You need that strong kind of backward compatibility:
> Just use 2.0 and please let the development kernels DEVELOP.
> Otherwise we will be quite soonly in face of an situation like Win95...
>

Great, so suddenly I need two machines to run our (in this case,
hypothetical) inhouse developed database client and the latest
Netscape? Get real. After having maintained Linux in a commercial
environment for years, I know binary compatibility is a *HUGE* issue.
Make it a CONFIG_* option, fine, but don't remove it for a LONG time.

There are many lessons to avoid from Win95, but let's face it... the
whole *success* of Win95 was because of backwards compatibility -- in
fact, the need for backwards compatibility completely overshadowed the
fact that DOS, then Windows, was a total piece of crap
technologically...

-hpa