[oclug] upgrade woes (what happened to Linux?)

[Grant Wong]

> > > <rant>
> > > WHEN THE HECK DID THEY FORMALIZE NAMESPACES IN G++ ??!??!?!!
> > > </rant>
> > >
> > Perhaps you should have written standards compliant code
> > in the first place.
>
> That's not entirely fair when the standard changes on a weekly basis.
>
> I'm one of the people who spent a great deal of time fixing debian
> packages to compile with gcc-3.0 ... and then 3.1 ... and then 3.3 ...
> So I do sympathise with the "write it right the first time" feeling,
> but it's hard ;-(


I like the "write it right it the first time" philosophy, too, but after
passing through a few dozen people and versions, no project that's landed on
my desk has managed to remain "perfect".  Heck, most of the time you have to
build on top of someone else's patches just to meet the deadlines.
Attempting to take out someone's patch usually leads to you coming to
realize why the patch was placed there in the first place (thank goodness
for cvs).

This collection of code is from many different sources and most not written
(or even plagiarized) by me so I'm reluctant to start manually editing
files.  I was looking for a general purpose, 90+% reliable solution (can
hand correct the last 10%).  Otherwise, it would be ... scary ... or
*boring*.

Oh yeah - namespaces were just an honourable mention when I took C++ (Deitel
& Deitel, 1st Ed - wasn't that long ago ... oh, wait - holy cow that's like
8 years!  I could have sworn I wasn't getting any older!)