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

[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

[cyclopentane@rheinneckar.social]

@tante i aspire to write software in a way such that "unmaintained" is a compliment

[leonid@norden.social]

@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.

[leonid@norden.social]

@NohatCoder @tante if it is really simple, then you can fork it and fix the issues.

[elrohir@mastodon.gal]

@tante but muh investahs

[hllizi@hespere.de]

@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.

[hllizi@hespere.de]

@joosteto
IIRC Xmonad is finished, too. But that's going to make its exit with X11 anyway.
@tante