Andre Poenitz wrote: > On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:07:05AM -0500, Paul A. Rubin wrote: >> I wonder if disk manufacturers are paying M$ to do this? I've got about >> 54MB of crap in %windir%\winsxs, with multiple versions of each set of >> files. Presumably there's no way for Windoze to know that something >> depending on an older version can use the newer version, so old versions >> never go away. > > In fact that's actually the most sensible behaviour since there are only > very few cases where a new version indeed can replace an older one > without any existing or imagined problem.
I respectfully disagree. I've worked on many projects that maintained backward compatibility with new releases of the API, and seen a great many more. And in this case, we're talking C and C++ runtimes, which should conform to the ISO standard anyway. There's no need for them to change every other week. > In particular that would mean > not only source and binary but also behavioural compatibility including > keeping buggy behaviour. No it doesn't. Undefined behavior is undefined; an application that relies on it is broken. And for the rare application that does, there are other Windows mechanisms for tying it to the old version of the DLL. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
