AND, there are things tool vendors can to do make updating easier. For
example, providing guidance on how to "fix" things that "break" in such an
upgrade.
I've recently been trying to help a Saxon user who's managed to get about 10
major releases behind, and it isn't pretty. Most of the things we do to ease
upgrade, like keeping things deprecated for a release or two before they are
withdrawn, don't work in that situation. Their worst problem though is that
they don't have a decent set of regression tests so they just don't know
whether their upgrade has been successful or not. That plus the fact that if
you close your eyes for ten years and then open them up again, the world is a
different place and you're completely disoriented.
I'm afraid the more people get out of the habit of paying real money for the
software they use, the less the amount of investment that goes into such
luxuries. Even when users are paying, $500 doesn't buy you much support.
It's sad how very little of the value that the user community has got from good
XSLT processors has been fed back to the developers to produce better XSLT
processors.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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