Development quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Development quotes of the week

Posted Nov 12, 2020 18:10 UTC (Thu) by lisandropm (subscriber, #69317)
Parent article: Development quotes of the week

I've replied in Jonathan's blog but it will need moderation. tl;dr:

> I'm especially sad when I see the glee which people have expressed when ditching libraries like Qt4 from the archive.

I'm probably one (if not the most visible) of them. But it's not just about progress: it's also about acknowledging the fact that "software life cycle" includes... well, death. Or pushing us maintainers to become the upstreams of a huge codebase.

to post comments

Development quotes of the week

Posted Nov 12, 2020 20:07 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

The problem is that (a) us oldsters get fed up of seeing the young people re-invent the wheel, and (b) I feel this especially in that I have to keep on re-training the even older oldsters, who often have learning problems due to their advanced years ...

Cheers,
Wol

Development quotes of the week

Posted Nov 12, 2020 21:53 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (3 responses)

Of course, this development quote wasn't about "youngsters reinventing the wheel", but "oldsters not maintaining their ancient projects for ancient hardware" and "vague, non-specified people who probably don't exist not spending effort packaging out-of-date libraries".

None of it is about "youngsters". None of it makes any of Jamie Zawinski's rants applicable; none of it is about reinventing the wheel.

It's about abandoned projects no longer following the growth and progress of the dependencies they depend on, that growth, especially in the case of Qt, being actually managed by the people who were working on those libraries twenty years ago.

If you take a good, hard look, what's going to shock you is not how "youngsters" are taking over by "reinventing the wheel" but how libraries like Qt, or platforms like KDE, are still largely developed by the same "oldsters" who were involved twenty years ago.

Development quotes of the week

Posted Nov 13, 2020 11:13 UTC (Fri) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link] (2 responses)

> None of it makes any of Jamie Zawinski's rants applicable
In case it's unclear -- and with humble respect -- I raised JWZ and xscreensaver to get attention and hopefully have someone help out.

I understand time is limited and there are so many hours in the day to make and maintain our computer systems. The code exists so that we can run the machines we use like we tend gardens, putting the suites where we want them to go, but tending gardens includes weeding and cleaning up.

I appreciate (in its technical sense) the nuances of keeping and culling unused code. Old code in legacy systems ossifies organisations around their legacy systems*. 'Vendoring in' stuff still goes by a rule of thumb I read here at lwn.net: fewer than a million lines and it's worth caching code you rely on in your own source code trees. And culling unusued libraries is a useful lifecycle act to free up time and mental attention to the things that benefit more people, with the caveat that the older code exists somewhere in a historical archive if system-archaeology needs to recover it and use it anew.

*: the long-term consequence of Conway's Law

K3n.

Development quotes of the week

Posted Nov 13, 2020 15:16 UTC (Fri) by lisandropm (subscriber, #69317) [Link]

> I understand time is limited and there are so many hours in the day to make and maintain our computer systems. The code exists so that we can run the machines we use like we tend gardens, putting the suites where we want them to go, but tending gardens includes weeding and cleaning up.

I really **love** this analogy.

Development quotes of the week

Posted Nov 17, 2020 20:22 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Relevant patch (Cc:ed from JWZ's thread):

https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland/blob/cae02421c...