So perhaps as a policy, we can say: "we give XX (2-3) years backward compatibility, but for rare and true necessities (e.g., python multiprocessing), you must upgrade your dependencies in order to use IMP since it's too important and helpful ; And if possible and not too complicated, we will strive to provide partial functionality even without such upgrade (e.g., you will have IMP but without python multiprocessing)."

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 4:56 PM, Ben Webb <ben@salilab.org> wrote:

On 07/30/2012 04:52 PM, Barak Raveh wrote:

I had 2-3 years in mind :) quite an arbitrary figure though.

Right, this is how I chose the most recent versions of Boost to support originally. But it makes sense to agree on an "XX" as you suggest. I think 2 years is reasonable.

It's just that flawed backward compatibility is usually not due to
amazing technological breakthroughs we cannot live with out, but
probably due to some package changing the name of function X to function
Y, or a few #include statements that need to be altered...

True, I think we can live without some fancy CXX11 features. More annoying is the lack of some Boost classes and Python modules (only very very recent versions of Python ship with the multiprocessing module, for example).

Ben
--
ben@salilab.org http://salilab.org/~ben/
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

--
Barak