decent fac/voicemail app available, temporarily, for free

[Matthew Carpenter]

This is a problem, to be sure.  Unfortunately, it seems to be a problem industry-wide.  I have recently heard the grumblings of an old man (56 to be sure :) about how Something works in Java 1.4.1 and is broken in 1.4.2.  I hear the same grumblings about Windozers upgrading to XP and learning all the apps which worked in 2k but not XP.  It's a problem/benefit called deprecation.  At least in the Java world, the API's are marked for years which methods (functions/procedures) will be going away and what to use instead.  I am not aware of this situation in OSS.  But codebases do need to be cleaned up from time to time.  It aids in both code maintenance and "concept" maintenance, whereby the conceptual approach to problems (eg from Java, the "Collections" interface for storing undefined amounts of data objects) is paramount for a cohesive intuitive API that aids in training new developers.  For those of you who do not know, the Collections interface replaces a different approach 
 to storing arbitrary groups of objects and represents a newer paradigm.

How to solve the problem?  I wish I knew.  But it might have to do with a new project to identify older apps and "graft" backward compatibility into GLIBc, or a compile option in the libraries which could be made into an additional RPM, loadable as needed only.

Or perhaps it is time to focus more on Static libraries which are provided with the apps?  Who knows.

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 06:44:15 -0500
dep <dep at linuxandmain.com> wrote:

> which is their fault, sure, but also underlines a weakness in free 
> software in general, which is the utter disrespect for anything 
> approaching backward compatability. it's not as if things are 
> deliberately broken, but there's no attention paid to not breaking 
> things, either.

-- 
Matthew Carpenter 
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

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