On Sat, 20 May 2006, James Cameron wrote:
> On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 01:01:57PM -0700, William Balcerski wrote:
> > As for statement 3, I still have not found an example where this patch
> > would break an old client.. they all use strlen(text) to get length of
> > the warning message, and none have parsed the player name.
>
> I'm happy to take a patch that shows this research more clearly; list
> the client source code repositories you checked, and when you checked
> them.

I'd prefer to think of the old protocol as just a piece of legacy code, for
stuff like Hadley's bot.  If any protocol changes are to be made, it should
be done to the real protocol, short packets.  It should be done in a
backward compatible manner.  If there is a problem with the network code,
it should be fixed.  Regressing back to 15 year old network code because of
an easily fixable bug in short packet is not the answer!

Changing the old protocol makes it hard for clients to support old servers.
How to tell what version of the old protocol this client is getting?  The
one that's been the same for 20 years, or whatever it has been changed to?