"Should we be laying groundwork now to prevent issues decades away?" I'll answer that with "Yes". I could provide some interesting stories about technological and budgetary headaches that result from repeatedly delaying efforts to make legacy software be forwards-compatible. The technical details of the tools mentioned here are beyond me, but I saw what happened in another org that was dealing with legacy software and it wasn't pretty.
Pine
On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 9:37 AM, Marc-Andre marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 2016-08-01 12:21 PM, Gergo Tisza wrote:
the parser has changed over time and old templates
might not work anymo
Aaah. Good point. Also, the changes in extensions (or, indeed, what extensions are installed at all) might break attempts to parse the past, as it were.
You know, this is actually quite troublesome: as the platform evolves the older data becomes increasingly hard to use at all - making it effectively lost even if we kept the bits around. This is a rather widespread issue in computing as a rule; but I now find myself distressed at its unavoidable effect on what we've always intended to be a permanent contribution to humanity.
We need to find a long-term view to a solution. I don't mean just keeping old versions of the software around - that would be of limited help. It's be an interesting nightmare to try to run early versions of phase3 nowadays, and probably require managing to make a very very old distro work and finding the right versions of an ancient apache and PHP. Even *building* those might end up being a challenge... when is the last time you saw a working egcs install? I shudder how nigh-impossible the task might be 100 years from now.
Is there something we can do to make the passage of years hurt less? Should we be laying groundwork now to prevent issues decades away?
At the very least, I think those questions are worth asking.
-- Coren / Marc
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