Andrew Halliwell wrote:
> Tim Smith <reply_in_group@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> In article <8creh6-d0c.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
>> Andrew Halliwell <spike1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> Whether it'll still WORK however, is another matter entirely.
>>> I know for a fact it stopped working sometime in the SuSE 8 or 9
>>> stage. ABI and API changes, new library versions and older linker no
>>> longer supported...
>>>
>>> Though I suppose you could install suse 6 (or Redhat 6) on a virtual
>>> machine to run it in.
>>
>> Compare to Mac: my copies of Word, Excel, and WordPerfect, from the
>> 1985-90 range, continued to work on my Powerbook until OS X 10.5,
>> released late 2007.
>
> Because the mac has an emulation layer for the old CPU architecture
> perhaps? That's the correct way to go about it.
>
> It's better to lose backwards compatibility once in a while than try to
> cling to the past and bloat out your OS with legacy crap to the point of
> implosion.
>
> You can always virtual machine/emulate your way around the problem if
> you need something that old...
>
Most of the times you can get an old program to work under linux by
supplying some symlinks for library versions which no longer exist.
ABI/API changes which brakes a program completely are rare.
And then, for 99.9% of linux applications that problem is non-existant,
since you can always compile the source anyway.
So linux has much more freedom in not providing backwards compatibility
than the closed systems like windows and OSX could ever have
--
We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms.
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