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

[gryphonmyers@mastodon.social]

@tante YES I am always saying this. Not everything needs indefinite maintenance, and certainly not periodic design refreshes that have become the ultra-frustrating norm.

[tony@toot.hoyle.me.uk]

@tante Opensource can uniquely do that I think. In the commercial world if you're not releasing a new version every few months customers start leaving, so there's huge pressure to add *something* even if it doesn't really make sense.

[joosteto@mamot.fr]

@tante

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#Version_numbering

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@webbop @tante

Or, better, make it easy to add features without needing a fork. Provide clear and stable APIs and hooks for plugging in scripting languages.

No single program can capture 100% of all users' requirements. The goal for a Free Software project should always be:

• Implement the 90% of requirements that are common to most users.
• Make it easy for users to add the remaining 10% themselves.
• Make it easy for users who have the same 10%s to share their changes.
• Make it easy for users who have overlapping 10%s to share the common parts with other people, including overlapping sets of people.

Once you reach this point, you're done.

[munin@mastoart.social]

@tante Give me one good reason my travel planner shouldn't also be a social network, news outlet, large data processor, and a PS1 emulator running Blender. I'll wait.

[missaemilia@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@tante Not even an open source hot take. Just straight up a software hot take. And it shouldn't be hot, been trying to say the same for years.

[howtophil@mastodon.social]

@tante "Maintenance mode" is actually good because it stops devs from changing the damn UI every month just to have "kept the project alive"

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@david_chisnall @webbop @tante as someone who tried to do this with SolveSpace: a clear and stable API is the other 270%, in practice

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@david_chisnall @webbop @tante (in the end it was never implemented because neither me nor, as far as I know, anyone else, could stomach the dramatic expansion in scope. people just switch to FreeCAD if they need more features in practice, which in my experience at the time was infinitely worse)

[sebastian@mastodon.com.pl]

@tante If you don’t have investors breathing down your neck and demanding a high return on their investment, then yes, the product may well seem finished.

[benofbrown@toot.cat]

@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.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@david_chisnall @webbop @tante or in other words: there's a lot to be said for designing for extensibility, but it's an order of magnitude harder design, implementation, and support task, and so outright impossible for someone for whom the base application stretches their skill and experience to the limit

open interchange formats are still very hard in many of the same ways, but not quite as hellishly difficult

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@munin *Claude Voice* You are making a very insightful point.

[pforpond@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@tante we already can (and do) do this, not sure what the issue is or where the hot take is?

[takiro@meow.social]

@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.

[leonid@norden.social]

@tante idk.. Done as no more features, but if there are no bug fixes since a long time, I wouldn't use it.

[orava@ruhr.social]

@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.

[nohatcoder@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@leonid @tante Maybe there are no bugs? I know that this proposition seem impossible to some people, but it is possible for sufficiently simple software. And it would be a pretty dumb reason to skip over it.

[rakoo@blah.rako.space]

@tante the corollary is that software should go back to being tools not products, and that is something many can get behind

[aedius@lavraievie.social]

@tante

People should fork small project instead of overbloat biggest project