How do you solve the problem of having a thousand versions to support
Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
51–60 of 588 posts
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#52> should never update a user interface without allowing the previous one to be used as the default I don’t understand why people are so precious about their UI and workflow. They obviously managed to learn and adapt to the current UI. Why can’t they adapt to a new one? If you’re super sensitive to something as trivial as a change to a menu location maybe that’s a sign you should be automating whatever your workflow i…
Hey, you know your car that you brought in for an oil change? I switched the turn signal controls with the wipers. No charge, and no givebacks.
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#53This is actually why I've moved the bulk of my ancillary programs over to FOSS alternatives because the majority do Semantic Versioning.
I know when a major upgrade is happening and I know when a minor patch is happening.
I still have proprietary software that is core to my work but I and my boss have gone out of our way to avoid "cloud" software and continuous release software.
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#54I like the main idea here, but the points listed are a bit extreme. Specifically this one:
> should never update a user interface without allowing the previous one to be used as the default
Are you ready to pay for the ongoing support of all legacy interfaces, including the ones you're not using and which are possibly not used by anyone in the world (no telemetry)? Are you ready for all the bugs and security issues this will cause?
Same goes for support of old file formats.
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#55I like the main idea here, but the points listed are a bit extreme. Specifically this one: > should never update a user interface without allowing the previous one to be used as the default Are you ready to pay for the ongoing support of all legacy interfaces, including the ones you're not using and which are possibly not used by anyone in the world (no telemetry)? Are you ready for all the bugs and security issues t…
Completely agree about interfaces.
File formats should be supported though. At the very least, I should be able to import a file from the old version and have it converted.
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#56> should never update a user interface without allowing the previous one to be used as the default I don’t understand why people are so precious about their UI and workflow. They obviously managed to learn and adapt to the current UI. Why can’t they adapt to a new one? If you’re super sensitive to something as trivial as a change to a menu location maybe that’s a sign you should be automating whatever your workflow i…
Hey, you know your car that you brought in for an oil change? I switched the turn signal controls with the wipers. No charge, and no givebacks.
I really think I could adapt to that easily and wouldn’t mind.
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#57> should be incremental and security or bug fixes only
> should never update a user interface without allowing the previous one to be used as the default
> should always be backwards compatible with previous plug-ins or other third party add ons
Even as a longtime user of Firefox, who lost access to a number of XUL addons once-upon-a-time, I have to disagree.
Some software upgrades cannot be "incremental or bug-fixes only." Sometimes you get handed a pile of hot garbage, and your best chance is to just refactor it. Certainly, you're not aiming to remove features or break workflows, but there exists a world in which some percentage N of users who are affected negatively by a change are not worth the effort of maintaining something. I think this viewpoint ignores that often as software gets more use and grows, our understanding of the problem-space and relevant abstraction grows as well. Black & white statements about what is or isn't allowed by developers in their products regarding updates completely ignores this aspect of development. Granted, if you can choose when to upgrade and to what version to upgrade this is less of an issue. Modern app stores do not function for the user in this respect.
As for the interface being updated: it happens. Sometimes it is worse, but then many times people only complain about things being "worse" because of assimilation bias. There's some fantastic reading about not necessarily catering to power users: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c011/4ca106ff22cf53aaed57d9.... I don't think I would 100% agree with that full article, but a lot of the central premises hold up.
As for killing compatibility with plug-ins or third party add-ons, I am upset by this as anyone but sometimes it needs to happen. Sometimes a breaking bug is abused by a third party for bad reasons as much as they can be for good reasons (e.g. banning add-ons that use exploits to mine bitcoin or data from users, even if the add-on was offering up a useful feature as well).
Now, relating to Firefox's recent Android update that breaks a lot of things, and even their behaviour for deprecating XUL in the past (I'm not referring to how long they gave people to upgrade, which was fair, but rather that some XUL features were never duplicated in webextensions thereby rendering some extensions impossible to reproduce), I would argue that yeah, maybe there is some sense of truth or some imperative that we need heed in the article. However, I think most of this would be mitigated by being able to pin versions, ask for a specific version from a specific date, or rollback. So maybe it's a wash.
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#58> should never be used to install telemetry or spyware or to re-enable it if it was previously switched off I lost track of the number of times a friendly Windows 10 (and 7) update has re-enabled telemetry. Either that or there is yet another , completely different post-update Wizard for advertisement, telemetry, default applications, and other privacy stuff (There sure is a lot of effort put in moving settings aroun…
>I lost track of the number of times a friendly Windows 10 (and 7) update has re-enabled telemetry. Either that or there is yet another, completely different post-update Wizard for advertisement, telemetry, default applications, and other privacy stuff (There sure is a lot of effort put in moving settings around each update!) ...and that's why I'm using LTSC, because it's limited to security updates and supported for…
I've read[1] that it's possible to legally obtain LTSC without volume licensing by purchasing a few other Microsoft thingies. Is such a method how you did this, or did you unfurl your sails?
Btw (rant incoming), this isn't a spiel against piracy. If Microsoft complains that people pirate LTSC without providing an easy legal way to obtain it, they can cry me a river. I just switched over to Linux from Win7 early this year; between spying on you, stability and data loss issues from firing their QA department, the auto-installation of Candy Crush, and the intentional difficulty in getting LTSC which doesn't have these problems, they lost me from ever switching to Windows 10. Which is an absolute shame, because if it weren't for those dealbreakers, it would actually be a good OS, and I would be using it on my desktop. Maybe someday I'll spin up a QEMU gaming VM, but if they ever make LTSC impossible to obtain, I'll just try to forget Windows 10 exists entirely.
[1]https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#59Some automatic updates should really just be different products. The most obvious one at the moment is Android Firefox is getting a big automatic update that, for a lot of people, will be a very big downgrade and an unfriendly UI change. But Mozilla doesn't want to maintain security patches for X different products. And that's true of most vendors. This model of computing where all users are always on the latest vers…
But Mozilla doesn't want to maintain security patches for X different products. Are they really different products (versions), or are they just branches off a common tree and share so much code in common that it would be close to trivial to apply the fix to them all? My experience with security-related patches is that they're almost all extremely localised --- a missing check, an off-by-one, etc. It seems like far le…
The issue with this is that lets say in patch 1.0.5 someone used that missing check to get another feature working.
Now if you apply the security fix to 1.0.5 the other feature breaks.
Re: Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
#60I like the main idea here, but the points listed are a bit extreme. Specifically this one: > should never update a user interface without allowing the previous one to be used as the default Are you ready to pay for the ongoing support of all legacy interfaces, including the ones you're not using and which are possibly not used by anyone in the world (no telemetry)? Are you ready for all the bugs and security issues t…
I think they mean that you only have to support the most interface besides the new one, not every single version