[Shootout-list] preserving historical data

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Bengt Kleberg wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> ...deleted
> > Why do you assume old software on old machines *WILL WORK NOW ON NEW
> > MACHINES?*
>
> let me refrase the question to:
>
> why do i assume old software, written for old machines, will
> work on new
> machines?
>
> because in my experience this is true. i have a limited experience,
> mostly with sparcstations and solaris/sunos. and the
> (admitedly not very
> good) scheme scripts i wrote in the 80's still work in that
> environment.

Well congratulations, you've managed to shelter yourself from the wild
and woolly world that is the Windows PC!  This stuff *breaks*, dude.
Please don't tell me you expect me to dig it all up 3 or 4 years later
and try to run it all again.

I went through hell reinstalling my VC6 after getting rid of it and
moving on to VC7.1.  I thought I wouldn't ever need it anymore, but
because of some laggard open source projects, I was wrong.  Stupid VC6
installation program wouldn't deal with some new underlying OS
components.  They had changed due to Service Pack 'security fixes'.
Nothing I couldn't handle if I reinstalled everything on a virgin
machine, sans service packs, but I wanted it on my *working* machine
that I use every day.

So you know what I did?  I popped in a removable HD, installed a fresh
OS on *that*, and fooled the installation into overwriting the stuff on
the *real* OS.  It was gross, but it worked for what I needed at the
time.  And I wasted shitloads of hours in microsoft.public.* forums
before I succumbed to that drastic solution.  I got reeeeal damn
familiar with certain MS libraries at the time - which of course I've
now all forgotten, 'cuz otherwise you'd go insane.  The only other
things I could have done were (1) abandon that particular open source
project that needed VC6, (2) reinstall my OS and every single damn app
just to get the damn thing to work, as I didn't have a 2nd machine
available for development.  (1) wasn't palatable and (2) was jolly well
unacceptable.

Oh, and my PC is a nice Dell, not some cheap Taiwanese piece of junk.
Not that this had anything to do with underlying HW... but it could!  it
really could!

The drill in PC-land is everything is disposable.  Software and hardware
gets supported and maintained for a few years.  Then the support stops
and people want money for whatever new shit they're selling you.  They
stop worrying about whether your old shit breaks.  In fact, they'd like
it to passively break, because then they know you'll move on to save
yourself the grief.

It seems you have no idea how much more stable your UNIX world is than
the Windows PC world.

How big are these archive files we're arguing about anyways?


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed McKenzie