Suggestion for terminal package maintainers

[Charles Wilson]

Sorry about that weird subject line. I have no idea what happened.

On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:39 -0400, "Charles Wilson" wrote:
> Ken Brown said:
> >  But it does seem that the release of 1.7 is a good time to ...
> 
> You know, folks, at some point we need to stop saying "1.7 is a good
> time to <make massive change X>" and just release it. We already have
> the following "backwards incompatible" [*] changes 
> 
> 1) dropping support for Win9x
> 2) no longer launch native programs from long or virtual CWDs (before,
> IIRC cygwin-1.5 would 'fake' the CWD as c:/ or something)
> 3) wide char support (and various existing changes related to LANG
> settings in console and other terminal sessions)
> 4) removal of registry usage / new mount table
> 5) old signal mask support removed (probably doesn't actually affect
> anyone)
> 6) [possible] switch to gcc4 as official compiler (with associated
> deliberate ABI breakage *without* DLL version number bumps -- see
> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2009-04/msg00034.html). It's pretty
> clear this will happen *eventually*. Whether it happens
> before/on/soon-after the 1.7 rollout is still TBD.
> 
> [*] for some definition of "backwards incompatible". Mostly, I'm not
> listing strict improvements, but only things whose behavior has changed
> in a way that either explicitly breaks old programs or might be
> surprising to a naive user.  I'm sure I've missed some items.
> 
> Each time we say "1.7 is a good time to..." and pull the trigger, it's
> another month of stabilization.  During that month somebody ELSE has a
> bright idea about yet another thing "1.7 would be a good time to...". 
> This is not good.
> 
> --
> Chuck