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SubjectRe: Kernel related StarOffice 5.1a problem


On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> > Andrea, I don't think that kernel should work around the bugs in
> >_that_. Really. Backwards compatibility is nice, but preserving every
> >undocumented quirk that nobody sane would use... Sorry, but we really need
> >an addition to errno.h: EBITEME. Exactly for such cases.
>
> Tell me why. 2.2.x is a dead kernel. It must work as best as possible
> until the unstable kernel will be stable and nothing more. 2.2.x is not
> the future. Fix the problem in 2.3.x and the 2.2.x quirks will expire some
> day silenty.

Yep. And in 2.4.0 we will see StarOffice breakage. Wonderful. Just what
will it buy us? It's not like it was hard to fix where it's broken. I.e.
on their side. Either they can do it now, or they will not do it in 6
months. Depends on the presence of somebody with a half-clue around the
whole thing.

> Fixing it will make you more happy in spirit, it will hurt users and won't
> help you in real life. I sure understand that the change is been a good
> thing for 2.2.13 and I _never_ complained about it at that time. But now
> that we did the sad discovery we could choose to return back to the
> behaviour.

I'ld rather avoid such precedents. Moreover, I think that in such case we
might check task->comm and recommend users to whack the crapware authors
with clue-by-four. Again, they _had_ similar problem. It's not the first
time. Period. If Sun can't find somebody who would have a shred of clue
about portability - too bad. For them. Submit a bug report to Sun. It's
their problem.

> I agree it's a very minor issue but I still can't see any downsides in
> putting back the undocumented quirk in 2.2.x.

Two words: nasty precedent. Again, it's not like a couple of days differed
from the 5-6 months in this case. Heck, the simplest fix would be
#!/bin/bash
echo "StarOffice is crap"
echo -ne "%d[yodda,yodda]\0" | dd of=$THEIR_BINARY seek=$LOCATION conv=notrunc


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