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