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Re: Avoid collisions between parallel installations of Cygwin


On Tue, 13 Oct 2009, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> The policy of "always use the newest" still makes sense to me.

Disclaimer: We are not the Red Hat customer who payed for this feature.

This policy only makes sense in an ideal world where complete backward
compatibility is guaranteed by the development team, and where any new bugs
introduced are rapidly fixed.  I submit to you that this is not the case
in reality from our own experience from 1.5.18 through 1.7, and is a
nearly impossible goal, especially for a volunteer open source software
project.

For example, I'm aware of few times where our original application built
and working under 1.5.18 did not have a significant issue with newer
versions; many of which were complete show stoppers.  Some of these issues
were due to policy changes that decided it was ok to break previous
behavior because is was deemed to never have been "officially supported".
Some were due to "bug fixes" that changed behavior to make it more like
Linux, others were due to bug fixes that significantly effected
performance, and still others were due to introducing new bugs when new
features were added.  If anyone really wants the complete chronological
list, I can provide it, but I don't think the details are where the point
lies.

I'm simply trying to point out that this policy was never really
practically sustainable.

-- 
Brian Ford
Staff Realtime Software Engineer
VITAL - Visual Simulation Systems
FlightSafety International
the best safety device in any aircraft is a well-trained crew...


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