RE: [WEB400] Release incompatibility (was HTTP 500)

["Reeve Fritchman" <reeve@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree.  IBM needs to provide a 2-year (or more) lead before making a
change that causes something to break (and I thought I suggested that).

New and independent functionality, by its nature, has no backwards
compatibility.  But anything else (a change to an existing function or
removal of a function) has the potential to tamper with a customer's
investment in software, business processes, and (possibly) hardware.  If
IBM's going to release the hounds and start changing CPF0864, fine.  We need
to know about it a long time in advance, and we need to support both CPF0864
and CPF97F4 for > 1 release (not release/mod, just release), and of course
this will change, er, reduce, the value of the iSeries because of the
additional investment required to retrofit required changes.

This may be a boon to software vendors (like a Y2K all over again) but
customers will get pissed very quickly.

So Microsoft actually cares about not breaking code?  Coulda fooled me and
millions of others!  I guess they can fix it all in their month off, right?

Regards,
rf

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-admin@midrange.com [mailto:web400-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf
Of Walden H. Leverich
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 9:44 AM
To: 'web400@midrange.com'
Subject: RE: [WEB400] Release incompatibility (was HTTP 500)

>From: Reeve Fritchman [mailto:reeve@ltl400.com]
>100% compatibility with old/obsolete/unsupported releases?

Reeve,

I've got to disagree here. I'll accept that argument when it is raised
against questions like "Why can't I move free-form rpg compiled programs to
V4R2?" or "I used a API introduced in V5R1, will IBM PTF that API back to
V4R5?" But this is a different case.

In this case IBM made already compiled code break. I don't view that as
backward compatibility, but rather forward compatibility. It's about the
same as IBM coming along and saying, "CPF0864 has been replaced by CPF97F4,
ok?" Imagine how much stuff would break then.

Backward compatibility is something to strive for, but not at the expense of
progress. However, forward compatibility is a requirement for any modern
business system. Hell, even Microsoft knows enough to make a new API when a
change to an old one would break existing code, just look at all the xxx and
xxxEx APIs. (eg. ShutdownWindows and ShutdownWindowsEx)

-Walden

------------
Walden H Leverich III
President
Tech Software
(516)627-3800 x11
WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com
http://www.TechSoftInc.com

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