On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 22:43 +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote: > - support for legacy applications
It is traditional to imagine that this requires source API compatibility. In non-open systems, it often means binary compatibility, and legacy support tends to become "all or nothing". There are two alternative choices that are possible for Hurd: 1. Settle for 90% or 96%. Give up some fraction for the sake of a long-term maintainable, principled system design. How painful this is depends on whether the 10% (or 2%, or whatever) includes applications you care about. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to know this without trying it. 2. Declare that in some cases small and well-localized source changes may be okay. One of the HUGE advantages of open source is that we CAN get changes integrated upstream, and/or maintain port patch-sets as the xBSD systems have done. Of course, upstream integration is better. There are a small number of GTK calls, for example, where a change might involve only two or three lines of well-localized source change in the calling application, but would result in a significant improvement in security -- including an improvement on Linux/BSD/etc. I think that both of these options need to be viewed cautiously, but we should not forget the additional options that open source creates. It is useful to remember that one UNIX is not perfectly source compatible with another anyway. Up to a point, these kinds of small changes can be viewed as one more small compatibility gap. shap _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
