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Never update anything

blog.kronis.dev

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81–90 of 288 posts

Re: Never update anything

#81

Post by nijave »

paxys wrote: post #5

Semantic versioning is a curse. It makes perfect logical sense until you are a few iterations in and quickly run into dependency hell as shown in the diagrams in the article. My solution to this isn't "never update anything", but rather "never version anything". People can choose to stick to the bits they originally got, which is perfectly fine, or they can switch to the current "live" one. As a developer I'm only ev…

I think semver is mostly useful for telling, at a glance, how much of the changelog/migration notes to read

I've noticed (more frequently) npm packages quickly climbing in versions (1-17 in a couple years) but at least it's painfully obvious.

Re: Never update anything

#82

Post by joombaga »

treis wrote: post #50
nameisname wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that using a build number in the way you're describing is just a worse semantic version. You now have no way to indicate if your changes are breaking. Separation of your pipelines also just got a lot more hectic because you could have a situation where you don't know what happened when you're missing "versions" (builds) because it's failing but still incrementing... Using build numbers for versioning doesn't r…

I think the concept of a breaking change is part of the mistake. If you want to change something you should introduce the new way and support it side by side with the old for a while while going through a depreciation cycle. I'm with the GP on this. Pinning to a specific version is a code smell. You should have enough confidence in your regression suite to always use the latest version. And hopefully enough confidenc…

The concept only makes sense in the context of APIs. I don't know if that's obvious; I've seen people use semantic versioning with software that didn't have public interfaces.

Even if you go through a deprecation cycle, you're still going to eventually have a build N with feature X, and build N+1 without feature X. That's a breaking change.

Re: Never update anything

#83

Post by nijave »

CTmystery wrote: post #37
paxys wrote: post #5

Semantic versioning is a curse. It makes perfect logical sense until you are a few iterations in and quickly run into dependency hell as shown in the diagrams in the article. My solution to this isn't "never update anything", but rather "never version anything". People can choose to stick to the bits they originally got, which is perfectly fine, or they can switch to the current "live" one. As a developer I'm only ev…

I'm trying to understand this comment. Do you never use package managers?

I'm guessing they're referring to conflicting transitive dependencies. Everything works fine when you use version 1 on date A. A couple years down the road, all those depends have matured at different rates and the top level packages all specify different versions of the same transitive packages so you have to try to line them all up.

On the other hand, the longer you wait to update, the worse it gets. Updating more frequently you can suss out packages moving quickly vs slowly vs not at all and address the problem before you're in update paralysis

Re: Never update anything

#84

Post by sbierwagen »

shimonabi wrote: post #39

I upgraded my Ubuntu distribution last week and my old Xerox Phaser laser printer stopped working over the network. Something like this should never happen. I hate spending my weekends troubleshooting the Samba configuration. Maybe I will connect the printer to a Windows VM.

I noticed my wifi router had an "update firmware" option. Hmm, I said, that sounds cool. Go to the trouble of looking up the manufacturer's support page for my model, download the file, poke it into the update box, click go.

Now all my IOT devices on the 2.4ghz now fall off the network after ten minutes and have to be manually restarted. I'm sure if I spend the time to look into it I'll find some fascinating difference of opinion regarding a detail of the 802.11b spec between the manufacturer of my very cheap wifi router and the manufacturer of the very very cheap wifi radios in my internet-connected thermometer.

Instead of doing that, I factory reset the router, and spent fifteen minutes restoring various configuration details from memory.

Re: Never update anything

#85

Post by strictfp »

travisd wrote: post #33
benburton wrote: post #17

> Docker Desktop doesn't let you decide whether you want updates or not, unless you pay them This made me uninstall Docker Desktop.

They actually just reverted this change within the last week (of course with accompanying “we love listening to your feedback!!!1!” eyeroll inducing messaging).

Welcome to Docker, I love you

Re: Never update anything

#87

Post by ekianjo »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #67
Brian_K_White wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I always say about this kind of thing is not "It's ok now because they un-did it." but "It's still not ok because they tried." If they are the kind of people who would try something, then they are still the same people and that problem did not go away. They will try something else again, and may in fact already be failing to work to my advantage right now in ways I just can't see. Once you know that, I prefer to…

So basically you must be 100% perfect all the time and are never allowed to make any mistakes. This is one of the attitudes that makes the internet so toxic IMHO.

on the individual level you can make mistakes. on an organizational level allowing this kind of mistakes means they discussed it and nobody found a problem with it. its a sign of disfunction.

Re: Never update anything

#88

Post by htpn38 »

Hah... I was bored and decided to just press the update button on all of my dependencies. I spend 2 hours changing things pointlessly and then deleted the branch and read why any of these updates were necessary. React Router - "wow, we have an amazing new v6"... *reads the "why upgrade"... "it has hooks now", ok they are already in the version I am using (5.2). "it has some changes to how you specify routes and you will have to rewrite them all. Just wait for automated rewriter". I couldn't really see any advantage to them at all but supposedly "something in the future!". ok delete that one. Material UI - we changed everything.... here is 10 page long how to upgrade guide. Also no date picker in core anymore. ok delete.... delete delete. I will not upgrade this project again. Lesson learnt.

Re: Never update anything

#89

Post by deeblering4 »

This is why I like running LTS distributions where versions are fixed and security patches are backported. Unless you install from 3rd party repos chances are very good that updates will be seamless.

Re: Never update anything

#90

Post by snowl »

Here, use this opinionated software to set up a react project and be frustrated about the amount of dependencies instead of just setting up a project myself! I just tested a base typescript react project, and you only need 14 packages on its own (typescript, react, react-dom) to build the project. Wow!
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