completely agree, I am one of those users who can stay happily with the same OS for 3 years :) "if it works, don't touch!"
On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Barak Raveh barak.raveh@gmail.com wrote: > I believe backward compatibility = more potential users. Snow leopard was > released 3 years ago and Apple ended it support only this July > (unofficially). It still must have millions of people that have it on their > lap-tops (some in our lab?). Why losing them as potential IMP users if it is > not absolutely necessary? I believe we should be certain we provide very > important functionalities before we drop backward compatibility (this also > goes for dependencies), since usually, there's no good reason for it. > > On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Daniel Russel drussel@gmail.com wrote: >> >> It is really not clear to me how much backwards support is worth it. >> >> >> For mac os, Apple doesn't do patches for versions older than the current >> -1, I believe. So no one should be running 10.6 at this point as they can't >> get security updates. So supporting that doesn't seem worthwhile. >> >> For linux, everywhere I have been it is either upgrade within 6 months or >> so of CentOS/RHEL/Ubuntu being upgraded or upgrade to every other version of >> Fedora. So again, its not clear that we benefit anyone by supporting older >> versions here either. >> >> For windows, I don't think anyone else will manage to build IMP :-) (I >> failed twice), so supporting old compilers there doesn't buy us much either. >> >> So while it seems nice in theory, I don't see that there is much benefit >> in practice to go far back. Has someone been at an institution where older >> than the above was used? >> >> On Jul 30, 2012, at 5:16 PM, Barak Raveh barak.raveh@gmail.com wrote: >> >> Good point (and Daniel said something similar in different words I think). >> >> 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 >> _______________________________________________ >> IMP-dev mailing list >> IMP-dev@salilab.org >> https://salilab.org/mailman/listinfo/imp-dev >> >> > > > > -- > Barak > > _______________________________________________ > IMP-dev mailing list > IMP-dev@salilab.org > https://salilab.org/mailman/listinfo/imp-dev >