Re: make: avoid breaking backwards compatability

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 09:30:53AM +0300, Jarmo Jaakkola wrote:
 > Anyway, I will never re-implement this.  If you want this behavior, you
 > either revert the changes or do it yourself.

Revert it is, I guess.

I'm not trying to be hostile or chase you off (to the contrary, I
would greatly appreciate help rototilling make, as it needs a lot of
work) but we can't go arbitrarily breaking features that it's had
since ~forever.

 > Are you really saying that we should allow ourselves to be held hostage
 > by the past?  Because what you're saying means that no changes should
 > ever be made.  There are bound to be some backward incompatible changes
 > when bugs are fixed or new features introduced.  Sometimes you just have
 > to bite the bullet and change the ways you did it before.

No. Breaking things that were never well defined or that nobody in
their right mind would have done on purpose is different from breaking
intentional features that people rely on. We've done lots of the
former; the problem is that we discovered after the fact that this set
of changes did the latter.

Even intentional features can be deprecated (and have been in the
past, and will be in the future(*)), but it takes time and planning.


(*) for example the objdir misfeature
-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost