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The OSWatershed.org projectThe OSWatershed.org projectPosted Jul 21, 2009 9:16 UTC (Tue) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375)In reply to: The OSWatershed.org project by kragil Parent article: The OSWatershed.org project
>Obsolete is a very bad word for what you are trying to convey. But I thought about it and I can not come up with a good term either.
'Superseded' is my suggestion, if you'll be so kind as to ignore the regressions. The older releases aren't obsolete in the sense of the definition at Wiktionary (which compares well with Google's 'Define:obsolete' search [2]). These older editions of software aren't obsolete (as in 'no longer in use; gone into disuse; disused or neglected (often by preference for something newer, which replaces the subject)' -- from Wiktionary). The evidence for that is the statistics shown here: it's still in use and very much not neglected.
I'm going to assume that there's a bias toward latest-and-greatest (possibly due to youth) which is part of this work. It's neat that someone's taken the trouble to assemble this data but don't know what you can really say about this: should everyone be using upstream and following it, so as to reduce effort finding and fixing bugs? Should there be a bug-fixed non-developmental Upstream series which is reliable and stable (and not labeled obsolete)?
[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/obsolete
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The OSWatershed.org project Posted Jul 21, 2009 9:46 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
If the greater Linux/FOSS ecosystem were to listen to Theo de Raadt (Dutch for "the rant" I guess ) we would all be tracking current.
AsiaBSDCon 2009:The OpenBSD Release Process: A Success Story
The OSWatershed.org project Posted Jul 21, 2009 10:01 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
"Unsupported upstream" might be a better term.
Of course then this founders on things like ffmpeg and (for a long time) glibc, which never even made stable releases (or threw them over the wall and forgot about them), so that the only thing upstream supported was the development trunk: yet they didn't expect average users to be running said trunk.
The OSWatershed.org project Posted Jul 21, 2009 12:46 UTC (Tue) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link]
> "Unsupported upstream" might be a better term.
Not all programs which are unsupported upstream are useless. Unless a better alternative comes forward, that program may be the only one that provides that function. Should a distribution drop a useful but stable program just because it hasn't been updated in the last five years?
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