On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:07:05AM -0500, Paul A. Rubin wrote: > I wonder if disk manufacturers are paying M$ to do this? I've got about > 54MB of crap in %windir%\winsxs, with multiple versions of each set of > files. Presumably there's no way for Windoze to know that something > depending on an older version can use the newer version, so old versions > never go away.
In fact that's actually the most sensible behaviour since there are only very few cases where a new version indeed can replace an older one without any existing or imagined problem. In particular that would mean not only source and binary but also behavioural compatibility including keeping buggy behaviour. When you factor in that application also can depend on runtime characteristics even optimizations might have to be ruled out, so there's really not much left what could be done in a newer version... Andre'
