Re: Discussion about why GNU/Linux system upgrades cause old programs to break

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  > There are two different classes of users of compilers: program
  > authors and program users building the source form.

  > The former is harmed, substantially, by such default laxness, because
  > they're enabled to write programs that are slightly wrong.  The latter
  > receives some slight relief from default backwards compatibility.

You're arbitrarily defining "wrong" based on official Standard C and
taking that moral stance for granted.  But that's not the standard
that I chose for the GNU Project.  Our rule is that there is a certain
range of machine behaviors that we try to handle, and we don't need to
go to any lengths to make code work on weird machines outside of that.

This GNU Project practice is prior to ANSI C (which wasn't finished yet).
I decided we didn't need to try to support all possible machines,
only the ones it was reasonably useful to support.

Of course, GNU developers are welcome to go to extra effort to support
a broader range of platforms, but it isn't required.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)