> How could one possibly answer that question? Even if he/she was a Be > engineer/manager...? In the past they never hesitated to break things if they felt it would be better like that. They switched from bebox to mac, from mac to pc, from metrowerks to gcc (and pe to elf), and probably some other things i don't know about between releases. And they didn't introduce any support to migrate from one of them to another. Even when they had both a ppc and an intel version available, they never created universal binary or anything similar. People just knew what their machine was and downloaded the right packages. OTOH, Apple decided to keep compatibility, when switching from 68k to ppc, from classic to osX, from ppc to x86 and from x86 to x64. The result is bigger apps with everything statically linked, an os written on assembly ending up being mostly emulated on another processor. This may seem nice at first glance because everything goes smoothly from a release to another, But it gives an heavier and slower system. Microsoft did the same for windows even without switching archs... -- Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy Elève ingénieur ENSSAT EII1- www.enssat.fr GSoC student for Haiku - http://haiku-os.org GrafX2 project team - http://code.google.com/p/grafx2