On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Merlin Moncure <mmonc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The only reasonable answer for this (a provably used, non-security, > non-standards violating, non-gross functionality breakage case) is > *zero*. Our historically cavalier attitude towards compatibility > breakage has been an immense disservice to our users and encourages > very bad upgrade habits and is, IMNSHO, embarrassing. > The flip side of this is that the ability to make improvements freely is one of the biggest strengths of free software over commercial software. Oracle and Microsoft invest *tons* of money in maintaining huge libraries of backward compatibility code and drastically limits their ability to keep making improvements. -- greg
