"Should we be laying groundwork now to prevent issues decades away?" I'll answer that with "Yes". I could provide some interesting stories about technological and budgetary headaches that result from repeatedly delaying efforts to make legacy software be forwards-compatible. The technical details of the tools mentioned here are beyond me, but I saw what happened in another org that was dealing with legacy software and it wasn't pretty.
Pine On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 9:37 AM, Marc-Andre <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2016-08-01 12:21 PM, Gergo Tisza wrote: > > the parser has changed over time and old templates >> might not work anymo >> > > Aaah. Good point. Also, the changes in extensions (or, indeed, what > extensions are installed at all) might break attempts to parse the past, as > it were. > > You know, this is actually quite troublesome: as the platform evolves the > older data becomes increasingly hard to use at all - making it effectively > lost even if we kept the bits around. This is a rather widespread issue in > computing as a rule; but I now find myself distressed at its unavoidable > effect on what we've always intended to be a permanent contribution to > humanity. > > We need to find a long-term view to a solution. I don't mean just keeping > old versions of the software around - that would be of limited help. It's > be an interesting nightmare to try to run early versions of phase3 > nowadays, and probably require managing to make a very very old distro work > and finding the right versions of an ancient apache and PHP. Even > *building* those might end up being a challenge... when is the last time > you saw a working egcs install? I shudder how nigh-impossible the task > might be 100 years from now. > > Is there something we can do to make the passage of years hurt less? > Should we be laying groundwork now to prevent issues decades away? > > At the very least, I think those questions are worth asking. > > -- Coren / Marc > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
