Subject: Re: #1028 USEFOR 3.1.2 Date: Resolved, I think.

From: Henry Spencer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2005 01:28:41 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> Legacy software does all sorts of things which we don't want them to do
> any more.
> Therefore, we write our standard so that those legacy implementations
> become non-compliant (because that is a good carrot to encourage them to
> be upgraded).
> OTOH, of course, we so arrange things (by making transitional/fallback
> arrangements where necessary) that the legacy software can continue to
> interoperate at least for the medium term...

Exactly.  It is important that legacy software continue to *work*, because
there is a lot of it around, and even with the best intentions, getting
even a large fraction of it upgraded will take a while.  But there is no
reason to declare it compliant, and indeed every reason not to.

Backward compatibility is a technical issue, not a compliance issue.  It
does not require us to permanently endorse every old mistake, only to
provide a transition path, so that software can move toward future full
compliance while remaining interoperable with the old mistakes for now. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       [email-masked]

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From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2005 07:44:12 -0400

> compliance while remaining interoperable with the old mistakes for now. 

Which is what my proposed text does, as everyone can see 
from my previous postings.