Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*.

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@leonid @hllizi @tante sure, but if that also works…?

[hllizi@hespere.de]

@mirabilos
Providing patches, you mean?
@leonid @tante

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@leonid @tante @hllizi the dependency

[hllizi@hespere.de]

@mirabilos
My assumption here was that the last compatible version has fallen out of maintenance everywhere, so any version that patches a bug cannot work anymore by assumption. Or am I missing something again?
@leonid @tante

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@tante @hllizi @leonid where there is a will, there is a way

[mxchara@cyberpunk.lol]

@tante I point out that this is clearly also true of physical creations, arts and crafts and movies and whatever: if the creator lingers on the scene, forever changing and tweaking and updating, the results are almost always unhappy. Nobody is happy that the origin Star Wars films got turned into some kind of ongoing project of Lucas's. But turning everything into a construction site keeps the most money flowing.

[hllizi@hespere.de]

@mirabilos
Of course, but it's not in the hands of the maintainer of any given piece of software anymore if they don't want to provide patches for old dependencies themselves so they won't have to change the code of the software itself.
@tante @leonid

[isaackuo@spacey.space]

@StryderNotavi @dashdsrdash @MisuseCase @ArneBab @tante That's okay, it's baked in to the definition of intuition. Not everyone has the "same" intuition, right?

[catraxx@tech.lgbt]

@tante This. I have thought this so often. "Oh this project is dead, if only does bug fixes." My brother in christ, its an image viewer! Wtf do you think it will become?!

[jwrm22@hsnl.social]

@mirabilos @tante A project without a release every six months is considered dead now?

In a way I have seen it myself as well, where I posted something like 'until further notice'. But the readers believed the message to be invalid as the notice was from last year.

[xerz@soc.masfloss.net]

@tante hotter take: finished projects should have their reasoning specified, including goals and implementation details

[Gæst]

@tante There needs to be a differentiator though to not mistake "done" with "abandoned" or plain dormant.

I found this podcast episode to be helpful to sort this field:
Abandoned open source with Josh Marpet

[zitrone@corteximplant.com]

@tante i agree, but it has to move at least as fast as its dependencies

newer library versions need to be incorporated, deprecated programming language features need to be replaced

so there is an inherent speed up when you go down the dependency tree

now matter the volume of changes, one could however still call this "done" as long as no new features are added

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@hllizi @tante @leonid do you know how often I became maintainer of something because I was the last remaining user? *shrug*

[tallsimon@mstdn.ca]

@hbons @tante

So "EMACS is just an editor" would have seen it finished by about 1978... 🤪

[hllizi@hespere.de]

@mirabilos
That's admirable but maybe not a model that works for everyone.
@tante @leonid

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@hllizi @tante @leonid if your software has a dependency, this is on the horizon implicitly

[hllizi@hespere.de]

@mirabilos

If it's the only possibility to keep the software running at all, of course, but just in order to keep the software running with an older version of the dependency so that you won't have to adjust the software itself?

@tante @leonid

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@hllizi @tante @leonid at that point it becomes a consideration, of course; but sometimes, there is no newer version

[hllizi@hespere.de]

@mirabilos
That's another thing of course, in this case there will hardly be any other option.
@tante @leonid