Linus Torvalds discussing source control programs and GIT

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 1:17 PM, Ben Walton <bdwalton-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> I'd be surprised if it is still runnable without a containerized OS in
> that time window. 10-20 years in this game is an eternity...
>
>
Indeed.  The "good" news is that, as a system deployed late enough in time
that we already have "containerization", it's plausible to containerize it
so that you could indeed keep it running for a goodly long period of time.

In contrast, consider the ancient Wingz spreadsheet
http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/financial/spreadsheet/Wingz-142.tgz

Binaries are still available, from 1996.  But getting it to run on a modern
system may require a decent dose of near-unobtainable libraries.  (Needs
some pretty old libc and Xlib.)

1996 is rather less than 20 years ago.

It would be an entertaining exercise to see what's needed to get Wingz
running on a modern AMD64-based Linux system.  I expect it's possible.

In contrast, if PlasticSCM uses GTK, then you need to maintain present
(probably past; whatever version they linked against from last year or the
year before) libraries for GTK, which, as it is an evolving
library/framework, and that'll pretty quickly become un-runnable.

I have a copy around somewhere of the "Corel WordPerfect Suite for Linux;"
that has assorted oddball dependencies on WINE, glibc (of particular
version), and such, and I'll bet nobody could readily get the binaries
running unless they have an exactly suitable InfoMagic CD set from the
1990s :-).

The policies for PlasticSCM seem troublesome too; it may be fine for an
uninteresting open source project with only a couple of users/developers,
but if that project became of broader interest, you likely couldn't use
PlasticSCM.  (indeed, efforts to do reverse engineering due to kernel
developers that were *forbidden* to use BitKeeper due to their work on
competing software are *precisely* the flammables that led to permission to
use it being taken away from the Linux kernel.)
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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