On Tue, 14 Mar 2000 14:39:04 +0100, Gilles Tran <tra### [at] inapginrafr>
wrote:

>Hmm. Actually there are people with a large amounts of legacy code and
>who are very thankful for backward compatibility ! I can work fast on
>very complex scenes today because I can re-use code written 4 years ago
>with little changes, apart the occasional missing semi-colon. And I'm not
>talking about code that would only take 10-20 minutes of rewriting (this
>is the time it may take already to track missing semi-colons).
>I do update old code but, believe me, a minimal backward compatibility
>is heaven-sent.

I can't deny that many people do like a certain level of
backwards-compatibiliy. It might surpise some people to know that *I*
even appreciate a *little* stability. For example, I wouldn't want POV
mutating into something totally incompatible with its previous
incarnation every other week.   :)

It just seems to me that there are people that take a negative
knee-jerk reaction to a proposed changed in POV, and wave the
backwards compatibility flag without giving it much thought. They are
often very vocal and dominating in their quest to crush a new idea.
Often times, they don't understand the new idea they are fighting
against. This can be dangerous.

My recent posts expousing my personal acceptance of breaking backwards
compatibility, to gain advanced features or improve quality is meant
to offer an opposing voice to some of these people. It seemed that few
people were speaking up in opposition, and I felt someone should take
the other side. It's hard to make an enlightened decision until both
sides of an argument are properly presented.

I'm sure that a certain amount of backwards compatibility will always
exist in POV. I'm sure that many people will be comforted by that
notion. My personal situation and feelings will not be applicable to
everyone, but expressing them might give the POV coders a better
understanding of the diversity of their user base.

Later,
Glen Berry

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