[LEAPSECS] article for Metrologia

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

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Joseph Gwinn writes:
> On Sun, 30 Oct 2022 07:08:25 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> The other ting to keep in mind is the immense existing codebase of 
> unix kernels et al, not to mention application code depending on 
> those kernels.

This is the mistake we IT-people keep doing again and again:

Forwards compatibility is /far/ more important than backwards compatibility.

For one thing, there is a finite amount of code to be backwards compatible with,
whereas the amount of future code is practically infinite.

Back in 1990 we had what, 30 years of legacy code for a quite small industry ?

Now we have that /and/ another 30 years of code produced by a vastly larger industry. 

"Immense existing codebase" ... not so much.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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