From: aland@informix.com (Colonel Panic)
Newsgroups: comp.databases.informix
Subject: Re: informix upward compatibility (fwd)
Date: 15 Aug 92 01:41:49 GMT
Organization: The Helen Keller Bondurant High Performance Driving School for the Blind

In article <1992Aug11.163009.4870@dlss2> james@dlss2 (James Cummings) writes:
>|> 
>|> Does anyone have any knowledge of the upgradability of the 1.10 code?  
>|> I'd like to avoid re-compiling everything if at all possible....
>
>	One potential problem you may have is the level of the operating 
>system that your client has.  When we were trying to find a fix for a
>bug (which incidently Informix was aware of), we were told that the fix
>should be fixed in the next higher release of Informix SQL from our current
>release.  When we got down to inquiring about the upgrade we find that
>the upgrade would not be guaranteed unless our OS was the OS that the 
>upgrade was ported to.  We have a 3b2/700 that is currently on SysV r 3.2.1
>the Informix upgrade was ported to SysV r 3.2.3 (hmmmm...).  "What's the
>*real* difference?", we asked...Informix just will not stand by the upgrade
>unless we were on the right release was the only reply.  Additionally, there
>should be another higher release of SQL, but it was ported for SysV r 4.0!

Ummm, no.  To my knowledge, SVR4 doesn't EXIST for the WECO-based 3B2s (e.g.
all 3B2s other than the 3B2/1000R3 models, which are Mips-based).  If it does 
exist, we've certainly never ported to it.

>Informix wanted to know why we didn't just upgrade to rel 4 of SysV and get
>their latest/greatest.  Folks, on a 3b2 that a major HARDWARE & SOFTWARE
>upgrade costing large denomination dollar bills.  I suppose what is 
>troubling to me about this is, that Informix addresses their "known" bugs
>in upgrades ported to the current release of the OS.  That's well and good
>if "everyone" is going to "always" upgrade the OS.  But not to support
>their product except in this way seems to abandon the end user to and
>upgrade everything or die existence.  

Do you have any idea how the support matrix explodes if you try to support 
the last several revs of the O/S (and I'm not talking about *different 
versions* of the O/S, e.g. SVR4, I'm talking just maint upgrades, e.g. 3.2 to
3.2.1 to 3.2.2 to 3.2.3 to 3.2.4)?

>	Ok....flames off now...in practice, it's conceivable that upgrading
>your clients 4GL may cost them more than just the 4GL package...tread 
>carefully and ask a LOT of questions about what's guaranteed by Informix.

We do nothing to break operation on old releases; to my knowledge, 4GL ported
using 3.2.3 will run fine on 3.2.1.  However, any changes in the O/S that *do*
break backward compatibility are simply not under our control; therefore, we 
can't *guarantee* compatibility on combinations which we have not certified.

--
Alan Denney      aland@informix.com      {pyramid|uunet}!infmx!aland

"In the cafeteria just after lunch, (well, not *just* after, more like
 *during* lunch, about 12:28; say 12:30, give or take a few minutes),
 I leaned back in my chair (it was one of those aluminum chairs, good
 strength-to-weight, like titanium but not quite; but then of course
 titanium would be a bit of an overkill).  Anyway, I heard one of the
 girls talking about how boring she thought engineers could be."
Newsgroups: comp.databases.informix