> Not a problem for free software, just update the old code if stuff breaks ;)
I know one qa team at Google had the slogan "if it isn't broken, you aren't working hard enough" but they are the qa team. It is their job to find defects before anyone else.
It is not our job as developers to create defects for no reason.
If you can even still get the updates on the backwards-incompatible package manager. (as anyone who's ever maintained an Arch system has probably run into, and even Red Hat used to run into this problem way back in the day.)
well, that's another problem. there is a difference between what the developers see and what the users see.
the developers should have access to the updated API/ABI code and maybe some migration documentation in order to update the program. the user should have a clear migration process to avoid data loss or corruption.
in this case, the package manager's core functionality should not depend upon any other packages. this way you can just store all the previous versions of the program and provide an upgrade path. sure, it will take a bit if you're doing a big upgrade, but that's tour fault for not keeping stuff updated
I know one qa team at Google had the slogan "if it isn't broken, you aren't working hard enough" but they are the qa team. It is their job to find defects before anyone else.
It is not our job as developers to create defects for no reason.