Miscellaneous questions

[Robert J. Hansen]

> Why? Just because new (perhaps incompatible) features are added in
> newer versions,... nobody has to use that newer versions, right?

If you put GnuPG 3.0 available for download, everyone who's looking for 
the latest release will grab it.  The people who are quite happy with 
1.2, 1.4 or 2.0 won't.

Now imagine that 3.0 breaks backwards compatibility.

Anarchy ensues.  A lot of your users can't talk to each other.  Most of 
them don't know why.  "I'm using GnuPG 3.0, I don't know why it can't 
talk to PGP 5.0, I mean, GnuPG 2.0 could...!"

Ensuring a migration path is so critically important in software 
engineering.  Breaking backwards compatibility is seen as an extreme step.