From: Attila L. <at...@le...> - 2015-03-25 06:55:36
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besides a full +1 for Christophe's position... > Telling the user "the function may sometimes terminate > just a thread, but not the whole process; so we will break your program > for sure by removing the function", may serve as a reference > example of disservice. Stupid disservice. I suspect a clinical case > of cretinism here. complexity has a long-term (accumulating) cost. what you write might be the non-cretinic strategy to follow until sbcl will not be the fork anymore, but rather the forked one... (which continues accumulating clutter and splits the efforts of the community). IMO the solution to the problem that software evolves is not that it should not evolve, but rather giving support for dealing with change (as opposed to trying to remain compatible forever with every combination of the dependencies). e.g. one or more of: - schedule the removal of such deprecation or semantic changes to rare major version number increases, and expect users not mixing software versions years out of sync (not my favourite solution) - the sharplisper team picking up the maintenance of abandoned code - authors publishing their code in a VCS and tagging it regularly with helpful tags (e.g. one of those could be a date-tag across all his code repos marking a consistent snapshot of his part of the code universe) also providing two separate branches for the bleading edge and for a reasonably stable head. - something like quicklisp: it's holding a consistent snapshot of the code universe and is trivial to install (i can even imagine such a snapshot-manager having snapshot-specific plugins patching SBCL's QUIT when loaded on a newer SBCL to accommodate for an older snapshot's requirements. but in no way am i suggesting here to push this issue on Xach!) - teaching proper conservatism (e.g. if you don't want to deal with change at this point then don't upgrade anything). i guess this is out of scope here... but i don't really have skin in this game directly, so... -- • attila lendvai • PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39 -- “'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.” — F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) |