Date:        Thu, 18 Oct 2001 16:05:05 -0400 (EDT)
    From:        woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods)
    Message-ID:  <20011018200505.D8206E8@proven.weird.com>

  | Remember too I (and kre, and I think greywolf, mcr, and others too) are
  | still only talking about breaking such backwards compatability with
  | MAJOR new releases, not minor ones.

Most of us were suggesting that perhaps bumping the libc major number
once, sometime not too far away (but not real soon either), might be possible.
Only one of us was suggesting that this be done for no better reason than
for fun.

If it gets done once more, a major effort should be undertaken to review
all of libc, so everything anyone can spot that might be a problem in the
future all gets fixed at the same time.

Perhaps more experience will show that it might be possible to repeat the
exercise in another 10 years or so, when the need arises again - perhaps it
won't.

kre

ps: I'm one of the ones who routinely uses apps compiled on earlier versions
of the system after upgrading - if that didn't work, then I'd never upgrade,
as upgrading everything else takes way too long to do during an upgrade
down time (and what's more, half of the everything else - perhaps more - is
someone else's problem, I wouldn't begin to know how to go about installing
some of what is installed).   I haven't seen anything to suggest that wouldn't
work though.  What won't work is recompiling apps before installing upgraded
versions of any other libraries that they need (and which themselves reference
libc, which is almost all of them) - that much I can tolerate breaking.

I also don't underestimate the amount of work involved in all of this.