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.
@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.
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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 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.
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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 "Maintenance mode" is actually good because it stops devs from changing the damn UI every month just to have "kept the project alive"
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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.
@david_chisnall @webbop @tante as someone who tried to do this with SolveSpace: a clear and stable API is the other 270%, in practice
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@david_chisnall @webbop @tante as someone who tried to do this with SolveSpace: a clear and stable API is the other 270%, in practice
@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)
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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 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.
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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 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.
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@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)
@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
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@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.
@munin *Claude Voice* You are making a very insightful point.
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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 we already can (and do) do this, not sure what the issue is or where the hot take is?
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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 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.
@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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@tante idk.. Done as no more features, but if there are no bug fixes since a long time, I wouldn't use it.
@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.
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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 the corollary is that software should go back to being tools not products, and that is something many can get behind -
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
