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Re: 1,000 year backward compatability of tools


From: Chris Albertson
Subject: Re: 1,000 year backward compatability of tools
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 16:03:40 -0800
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS i86pc; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020815

I have a few "antique" computers.  The first Compaq, A very early
Sun SPARC 1. a Mac before they offered a hard drive and others
Had a VAX too, but no place to store it and some guy offered me $1,500 for the tape drive...

These machines are only worth keeping if you still have the old
software that they used to run.  If you load a current version
the machine looses it's value as a "museum piece".  Most people
don't want new versions of anything on these old machines and
would be far happier to find a 12 year old IRIX CD set then
a working gcc 3.x

I did try putting current OS on the old SPARC just to see if it
would work.  From power on it took __over an hour__ to get into
an xterm window. Booting and loading X11 took that long.



Bruce Korb wrote:
Charles Wilson wrote:


I think the "winning" argument was as follows:
  for archaic systems whose shell does not support shfuncs, 'somebody'
should create a snapshot of bash with a frozen autotool version....


That's the argument that has been put forth over and over for years.
I couldn't remember if it was finally accepted or not.  It was deemed
insufficient for so many years....


Recall that just because NEW autotools will/may use shell functions,
that doesn't retroactively break all existing packages that are already
"out there".  So, the poor Ultrix user will only need "bootstrap bash"


However, AFAIK, nobody has actually created that "bootstrap bash"
package, or if they have, it has not been widely publicized.


That's because the few hobbiests maintaining the museum pieces
manage to cope and all the remaining antiquarians are either
theoretical or silent.  The people speaking up seem to be those
who worry about the theoreticals instead of people with real problems....
"It's time to move on."









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