Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
People should fork small project instead of overbloat biggest project
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante i aspire to write software in a way such that "unmaintained" is a compliment
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@leonid @tante what if there are no known bugs? Some stuff is just quite stable. Personally I prefer that over a project adding new features all the time with the risk of introducing new bugs. Sure if the issue tracker is full of bugs and no action that sounds dead. But there are also quite active projects, regular new features, that have an issue trackers full of bugs. but nobody cares about maintaining it's all about new features.
@orava @tante I came across many libraries and applications that hadn't had any commits for months or even years. There were also a lot of issues in the tracker. They are probably abandoned. I would never use them in my projects.
Sometimes, updates are released to fix issues or security vulnerabilities in dependencies.
I think a small, relatively isolated library or project can remain stable indefinitely. However, even these will have some dependencies, such as the OS.
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@NohatCoder @tante if it is really simple, then you can fork it and fix the issues.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante but muh investahs
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante
It's not without irony that software in theory provided for the possibility of crafting technological objects that could last forever for the first time, while in practice they expire faster than Liz Truss. -
Well, there is TeX (36 years without new features):
The design was frozen after version 3.0, no new feature or fundamental change will be added, so all newer versions will contain only bug fixes.Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features
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@tante idk.. Done as no more features, but if there are no bug fixes since a long time, I wouldn't use it.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante same goes for videogames.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante I do agree, but if I think there’s no change in literally years, it can sometimes be hard to know if it’s just because it’s done or because it’s not maintained and now have security issues or other problems.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante Was this pointed at Google or Microsoft. Both seem to believe they should "improve" things until they are unusable.
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@NohatCoder @leonid @tante the famous Donald Knuth projects, so bug free he personally offered bug-finder cheques that people framed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
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@tante I remember seeing people complaining on a Steam forum of a game about the game being "dead". It was a single player game and the developer replied that the game is simply done and finished and the reason it didn't get updates for years is that there are no known bugs to fix.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
While I don’t disagree with the premise that software that delivers on its original purpose doesn’t need to be endlessly expanded, the reality is that all software lives within an ever-changing ecosystem.
Curl comes to mind as a tightly defined set of functionality that still requires constant work because of new protocols and the need for relentless optimisation.
I’ve seen a lot of software age like warm milk because people thought they could just deploy and forget about it.
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@tante I was archiving a load of CDs a while ago and noticed cdparanoia hadn't been updated since 2008. And why should it be? It's achieved its goal and does everything it set out to do. More things need to be like cdparanoia.
@benofbrown @tante in an ideal world. but 3rd party libraries change, vulnerabilities are discovered, system APIs change, GUI libraries change. Making old software build on modern systems can be very challenging and a lot more work than people think.
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@tante maybe a way to deal with that could be to write more often about the tools that already exist.
I remember how the university provided training all the time about citation management with Zotero, but there wasn’t a single training about bibtex.
Even though that is ingrained into many academic workflows and usually just works.
The mantra of the last 25+ years has been that desktop computing is easy and ubiquitous and all programs should be easy.
Because they are easy, they do not require manuals or good documentation and most importantly, do not require training and education.
The reality is that every field of endeavor is complex and messy and has lots of stuff to learn. Management gravitates to "it looks easier, so it must work better" and this is almost always incorrect.
Meanwhile, many people have adopted the idea that they "aren't good at computers" when in reality they have never been taught and don't even realize what there is to learn.
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante fewer apps, more utils, please
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Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante When I was a more active participant in the erlang ecosystem, that was one of the nice things about it -- there are some old, good libraries which haven't been touched in years, because they're finished. And people in the community were ready to defend those libraries and that position when anyone expressed reservations about using them because they were old.
