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Compatibility woes / deprecation (Miscellaneous)

posted by marcov, 18.02.2009, 11:12

> > VMs are not fine, since slower than normal.
> Have you tried the ELF "Gold" linker with FPC on *nix?
No why?

> > See earlier msgs. Nothing is broken, old versions keep working. It is
> > only if you want new stuff, you will have a problem. But then, for new stuff,
> > no dos maintainer can be found.
> > Or Win9x devs too? Seriously, I find that hard to believe.
Win9x is effectively also unmaintained. However some loose patches for it come in once in a while. That it still works is that till now hardly any NT only functionality was needed in the base system, so that fairly rarely something broke, rather than that w9x is debugged and maintained.

However with the Unicode modifications, this is going to change. It will depend on how those unicode layers can soften this blow. No telling yet.

> 2K works I think (ask rr), but that's 'cause they made it
> better in order to "merge" WinME and Win2K into one big product:
> WinXP.

I doubt it. I think it was more a request from business users after NT4 And XP was not even on the horizon when this was decided.

> > The few dos laggards remained on their "true" doses. So there was not
> much
> > motivation to begin with.
>
> Not true, a lot of people use WinXP etc. for their DJGPP development.
/me doubts if there is "a lot of people" doing "DJGPP development" at all.

> > No, but it does make the dos port less usable, since the pure dos users
> > are far,far in the minority.
>
> Which is a chicken and egg problem. If nobody tools support Win9x, nobody
> will develop for or run it. And then they'll whine, "Well, nobody's asked
> for it", but that's because they don't support it!!
I've told you a dozen times that the people that use a target should carry the burden for it. That is the real chicken/egg.

If nobody uses it, or the people that still use it mainly work with a few apps in legacy mode, or stick to a few outdated commercial tools because it is easier, yes than Open Source will wane.

> > The world moved on, and some people prefered to stay behind. Now they
> are
> > complaining they really got left behind.
>
> No, they are complaining that things which should still work no
> longer will due to willful negligence of the vendors.

IMHO that is slander.

> And the whole point
> is that even hallowed Win32 won't remain stable enough, and that will be
> deprecated, new will come, that will be deprecated, ad infinitum ....
win32 never was stable to begin with and constantly expanded. Forward compatibility was never guaranteed.

It's just a gradual shift that is accelerated by the need for unicode, and the waning numbers of win9x users.

> > Hmm. I thought the US mostly spoke Spanish now? Moreover they sell
> > abroard.
>
> Not even close. Sure, there are some (small) Spanish-speaking minorities,
> but it's far far far from being widespread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_in_the_United_States

> (Besides, Spanish is
> well-covered in Latin-1, and which alone isn't enough of a need to move to
> more-complex Unicode.)
Well, that is not cp437, so there you have your first conflict.

> Um, your whole argument is "If no one uses it, why should we bother?"

More like "if even the people that use it don't bother, why should the ones that don't care?"

> So you're effectively struggling with UTF-8 when nobody cares much beyond
> even Latin-1 (if even)!
Well, that is simply not true. Note that UTF-8 actually cleans up a lot of old stuff with multiple codepages.

> > There are no developers for new releases. That is as good as a dead
> > sentence.
> But how did Win9x suddenly move from "good enough" to "bad"?

Same as with dos mostly:
Nobody anymore looking into specific win9x issues for years already. Userbases are/were eroding away, and then you suddenly find bugs in existing releases that would have been blocking for serious users. Nobody noticed.......

> And did they forget how to maintain it?? No!
It requires active work to investigate such claims. Your whole argument is based on the fact that keeping something working in a live codebase requires hardly any effort, which is simply false.

> > So no more new releases. After a while, also the old releases will be
> > kicked indeed. (If I don't support it, I don't want it on my site),
> hence my suggestion to start an archival group if you really care.
>
> Very reckless attitude to kill good, working software. Ridiculous.
Very reckless to not actively try to preserve what you use. Suicidal.

> > The only win98 that I have seen in 4 years was the one I installed
> myself.
> > It _IS_ rare.
>
> I've only seen very very very few Europeans in 4 years, but that doesn't
> make them rare, too. :-P

It would have been if you saw heaps of them every day in the same region a few years back.

> > Odd. I wonder how I got my _64-bit_ (bigger) Vista in 8GB then.
> Which is still 8x (or more) the size of XP.
But relatively they are getting smaller :-)

> But ironically, Firefox 2.x was a bloated pig and only 3.x corrected some
> of that. And yet the machines who would most benefit (Win9x) aren't
> supported. Go figure.
Apparantly nobody using them anymore. Otherwise those people who had most to gain had fixed it, or created an alternate release.

> > > I in no way love XP to death. It was worse in many ways to Win9x.
> >
> > Only in the dos support. I don't know any other way.
>
> Apparently you don't understand. Windows NT used to have POSIX, OS/2, and
> DOS subsystems. How many of those still work? Don't you see a trend here?
(afaik OS/2 was never released), the Dos system actually got better over time.

But for the rest, yes there is a trend. But I
(1) don't understand/consider it a problem. Mountains rise and fall too, nothing is forever.
(2) don't understand why you expect it NOT to break.

> And don't give me the marketshare crap. Why does it break?

Who is going to pick up the bill to keep it running?

> Is a new OS worth more somehow by actually doing less???
Nonsense, they do a lot more, they just clean out some legacy cruft.

> > See above XP couldn't run all 2k and nt4 (2k supported some nt4 ones)
> > too.
>
> And ME broke driver compatibility, just as Win95 did, just as Win16 did.
ME doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned. I skipped it.

> So basically, every five years you have to upgrade to newer
> hardware, whether you want to or not.

No. You can use your old hw indefinitely. You just don't get new software for it, unless you (both you personally as in the community on said platforms) either do it their selves or fund it.

> And that requires the latest
> Windows, too. And that requires more RAM, so you can't use older machines.
> But since newer drivers won't work anyways, oh well. (My digital camera is
> from 2005, not exactly old. Does Vista 2007 work with it? No. Not a huge
> deal, but when your printer, scanner, camera, software, etc. don't work,
> then what? Might as well buy a freakin' Mac!)
All my HW worked with Vista 64-bit, except my creative soundcard. I didn't like that, but you are exaggerating grossly.

> > Reference? The new DRM guidelines (that Hollywood btw forced upon MS)
> > broke already a lot.
>
> Then netbooks really are good, esp. because there is no optical drive at
> all. And yet will Windows 7 on the netbook be crippled similarly?
> Probably.
I don't like netbooks except for their intended use: limited very mobile surfing and mailing, which I don't do enough to warrant the expense. (I had a EE on loan for a while) Main gripes: bad keyboard and too lowres monitor. Fixing those issues turns them into an underpowered, but otherwise ordinary laptop. (even pricewise)

> The whole point of things like ANSI C and POSIX is that it'll be portable.
HAHAHHAHA, <chokes and laughs>. You still believe that?

> And yet what good is having standards like that if compliant systems are
> ignored for no reason?
You can make that statement go up for anything if you ignore other peoples reasons. It is a bit self-centered.

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