Sometimes it is just enough to let the old versions in the old system and start afresh in the new system with the last version of the project. I think that the main reason for a project not being accepted is that they lack enough traction and aren't end-user appealing. Also, there can be a few hard core users of a system but the real measure of impact is the number of new users they got. A bad (or good) example, some years ago there was MySpace. It was the site all the garage bands want to be in. It was the place for young people. Then there comes Facebook and in just a couple years put MySpace to bite the dust. There was a way to "migrate" your info (post, messages, pics) from MySpace to Facebook? I (really) don't know, but I doubt that if they existed they could make the migration faster that it was. The people just went away to the new shiny, easier, more social and more appealing that the old crap that MySpace pages were. People sometimes doesn't care for the past. Just a good system (I am not talking about facebook anymore, I don't use it) is enough to move a lot of people from old system to new system. Cheers El lun, 02-05-2011 a las 10:00 +0200, Janko Mivšek escribió:
I think we should learn very carefully from Gemstone migration experiences to develop our Smalltalk systems *upfront* with migration in mind.
Just see all recent (or less recent) examples: MC2 seems too radical to be easily migrated from MC1 and obviously designed without migration in mind, SqueakSource as well, SS3 too?
Such systems just don't have any chance to be accepted and old systems will live and live instead. So, don't develop just a "cool" stuff, take some time to think about migration and long-term maintenance issues as well, if you like that your system will be accepted with the community to your glory :)
Janko
On 27. 04. 2011 22:16, Dale Henrichs wrote:
Since you mention GemStone:)
We have customers who have migrated repositories created 10+ years ago with our 32 bit product to the latest current version of our 64 bit product.
We have changed our Smalltalk class-library over the years and customers have had to upgrade their own class libraries if they chose to continue taking advantage of our newer releases ... then there are some who have chosen not to migrate: I think there are still production applications running GemStone on a version 20 years old:) ... as long as their hardware holds out they are fine:)
Production customers don't tend to move very fast in upgrading their hardware and software so we end up supporting older versions of oSes for quite awhile...But when the os vendor announces and end of life of an os, it becomes difficult for us to continue to support that version...
For the older versions we backport critical bugfixes to the older versions as long as their are active customers (read paying maintenance dollars) using the older versions.
Dale
-- Miguel Cobá http://twitter.com/MiguelCobaMtz http://miguel.leugim.com.mx