On Mon, 20 Jul 2020, Richard Troy wrote:
List member Oliver Nicole rightly makes the following observations - here
excerpted - about the apparently not just proposed but apparently certain to
happen changes to this project which will negatively impact a great many
people, with a few in-line comments for context before my conclusion. To wit:
From: Olivier <[email protected]>
[ ... lots deleted, this is just an excerpt ... ]
Most likely they will not see the message about the obsolescence, and
one day, when compatibilty is over, their stuff will stop working and
there will be no way to solve that ecvept to painfully go back to an
older version of SA or manually go through all the problems of all the
angry users.
As a system administrator for some 37 years, and as someone who has acted in
a support or consulting capacity to others in such role(s) for well over 30
years, I can tell you this observation is quite correct. In fact, this is the
dominant circumstance, by far.
VERY importantly, nobody wants to be stuck on old versions, as Oliver
proposes will happen (and he's right about that), and so this puts system
administrators in a VERY difficult position - a position I'd venture the
proponents don't really understand. The choice is one painful one versus
another painful one. Only someone who's actually been there really gets it.
If you offer compatibility with only a warning message, most people will
ignore (or simply not see) that message and do nothing. And when the
compatibility is over, they will be facing a wall, just the same as if
there were no compatibility period. You are just pushing the mayhem back
by one year.
I'd argue that most won't see it coming at all, though there is, of course,
no way to prove that. But it's simple human nature; when we are overloaded,
as nearly 100% of us perpetually are, we ignore a LOT of warnings we should
have, with our better selves, seen coming, from our health issues like cancer
to our children's issues to computer log files, it's just what happens; we're
simply so busy in our daily lives just trying to get by that we miss signs we
could have seen. The VAST majority of us are in economic instability,
especially with the effects of this Covid-19 pandemic; to expect us to be
paying close attention to warnings in logs is objectively silly. (Perhaps the
proponents of this change are simply too comfortable in their economics and
too isolated from actual users to see these truths.)
...I believe the above makes the case for why backwards-compatibility needs
to be maintained into perpetuity, but Oliver actually suggests a neat way to
solve this AND the political problem that openly saying that would create. He
writes:
**THIS** is why I called a vote for publicly committing to permanent
backwards compatibility and why I am so painfully dismayed that Kevin
seems to be so set against it.
Kevin, will you *please* reconsider your position, in the interests of the
*USERS*?
Would offering backwards compatibility behind a config option (as Oliver
suggests), and which is never removed absent a compelling technical
reason, be a reasonable compromise?
--
John Hardin KA7OHZ http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
[email protected] FALaholic #11174 pgpk -a [email protected]
key: 0xB8732E79 -- 2D8C 34F4 6411 F507 136C AF76 D822 E6E6 B873 2E79
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