There's a very interesting book called "Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success"†. Actually, IMO only about half of it is interesting, the parts about how Hollywood makes movies is fascinating, the rest of the book seems to me to be a mildly enterprisey pitch for Agile Methods, (of which YMMV.)
THe fascinating thing about Hollywood is that it's old (over a century) and they have developed a system that works: it's rare for a film to go over-budget or over-schedule.
I can't do a proper summary here, but the fundamental gist is that they have detailed plans, that experience says are realistic, and they track those plans closely and deal with divergence systematically.
†https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hollywood-secrets-of/97...
Anyway, one of the tools they use, if transposed to the IT industry, would be something like an Inventory of Dependencies. It would list every piece of software that your system depends on along with costs, risk assessments, and alternate dependencies for each. I don't have the book with me or I'd give more details.
My point is, we should do this and usually don't. It's kind of on the company management if you're using, e.g. cURL, and your stack blows up and only then do you discover there's not a great "support story" there, eh?
Taking infrastructure for granted is not how you get reliability. FWIW.
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BTW, readline and bash are maintained by one volunteer.
> GNU Readline is today maintained by Chet Ramey, a Senior Technology Architect at Case Western Reserve University. Ramey also maintains the Bash shell. Both projects were first authored by a Free Software Foundation employee named Brian Fox beginning in 1988. But Ramey has been the sole maintainer since around 1994.
> Ramey has now worked on Bash and Readline for well over a decade. He has never once been compensated for his work—he is and has always been a volunteer.
> I asked Ramey what it was like being the sole maintainer of software that so many people use. He said that millions of people probably use Bash without realizing it (because every Apple device runs Bash), which makes him worry about how much disruption a breaking change might cause. But he’s slowly gotten used to the idea of all those people out there. He said that he continues to work on Bash and Readline because at this point he is deeply invested and because he simply likes to make useful software available to the world.
https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20772053