[glob2-devel] About maps backward compatibility

[Cyrille Dunant]

Maps are long to make.

Good maps are rare, and we already have few. It is completely silly to 
eliminate backward compatibility for the sake of it. 

It destroys hours of work of many people that did the maps.

It forces us to get a new set of maps

It serves no purpose as basically you can perfectly have a new and old map 
format: you only need a filter.

It introduces new bugs where there weren't (make no mistake, all code is 
buggy, and there is no reason a rewrite will be less buggy than the original)

So unless there is a compelling reason to redo any subsystem at all (this is 
especially true for the maps), I think it is a bad idea in general: if it 
ain't broke, don't fix it!

Now there _are_ problems, for instance, network play needs to be flawless, and 
if that takes a rewrite, so be it! But it serves absolutely no purpose 
whatsoever to break backward compatibility for no purposes other than to 
essentially destroy valuable work.

Because make no mistake: having good maps (or having maps at all) is _way_ 
more important than saving five minutes by not implementing a filter.

 -- CFD

PS, in general, rewriting for the sake of it is not a good idea, unless you 
found some basic architectural flaw.

PPS and from a development perspective, rewrites of subsystem should be done 
in separate branches and merged when well-tested and feature-complete.