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A comment on Microsoft Has Manually Patched Their Equation Editor Executable. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft Has Manually Patched Their Equation Editor Exec... by rob74 on Friday November 17, 2017 @10:14AM (#15722566)
I noted it - thanks for the background info on the company! I also assume that either they are not able to maintain the software themselves, or they have lost the source code, but it might also be that setting up the toolchain to compile such an old piece of software is more effort than just patching the binary.
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Re:Microsoft Has Manually Patched Their Equation Editor Exec... by sjburt on Friday November 17, 2017 @03:42PM (#15725805)
This is such an underappreciated aspect of code stewardship. There are powerful tools for source control and archiving. But ensuring that state of code could actually be built at an arbitrary date in the future is so much less assured.
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Re:Microsoft Has Manually Patched Their Equation Editor Exec... by londons_explore on Sunday November 19, 2017 @10:24AM (#15734247)
I agree here.

I would guess the build environment involves lots of dependencies, lots of special config, lots of stuff which has to be the exact correct version, and all that knowledge has been lost as people have left the team and it wasn't properly documented.

Sure, you could spend a couple of weeks setting up a suitable environment again and relearning everything from scratch, but binary patching is probably easier.

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