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Never update anything

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Re: Never update anything

#121

Post by saghm »

jart wrote: post #117
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved and lived Windows for a decade and felt so cozy and at home in it, but when the first force-upgrade happened, I knew it was time to move along. Just cannot accept things changing without my consent on my workstation.

Mac and Linux do the same thing. I know people who still prefer the OSX 10.3 and the GNOME2 GUIs, or for instance the way nytimes.com looked back in 2010. That's the problem with making GUIs the thing you love. Some goons stop by your home every few years and toss up the furniture. Apple is the gold standard since it pretty much looks the same as it did in the 80's and each major version tunes subtle things. Microsof…

> Mac and Linux do the same thing

The earlier responses in the thread were talking about forced upgrades. I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; you can continue to use old packages and even reboot the machine indefinitely. Sure, you might not get security fixes or keep unrelated packages up to date beyond a certain point, but that's not at all the same thing as updates being applied without actually being invoked by the user.

Re: Never update anything

#122

Post by brailsafe »

secondaryacct wrote: post #113
abraxas wrote: post #98

"When your company won't be the first to market, because about 20% of your total development capacity needs to spent on keeping up" In the world of JS and Typescript this ratio looks more like 80%. I swear that node hipsters at my last job spent four out of five of their working days wrangling with dependencies or their transpilers, linters, packagers, bundlers and whatever the hell else needs to happen to actually m…

Having always been fullstack even in my current large traditional bank, I see both codebases in Java 6 and maven poms that are a paradise to change (and a java 8 upgrade is often trivial and sufficient to get most of the nice candies you really need), and yarn/npm frontend projects that cant be even rebuilt two weeks later, everyone insanely writing auto updating version descriptor (^2.0.4 with the ^). I cannot under…

If you can have a Java backend that's more or less totally decoupled from the frontend, great. Java and it's tooling are fine, and it's easy to be productive writing in Java. However, my only experience as a frontend dev with Java backend system has been truly nightmarish, because the backend processed all the frontend assets and rendered them. If anything, this is what helped me burnout, because everyone on my team writing Java was super productive and delivered on time, while I couldn't test my JS, CSS, or HTML changes without restarting Tomcat on my fucking useless 10lb HP laptop that the corp required me to use most of the time, because that's what all the Java developers used to get their Java working.

Re: Never update anything

#123

Post by snorkel »

web007 wrote: post #107

Corollary: Do hard things more often, per Martin Fowler - https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FrequencyReducesDifficulty.ht... Upgrade everything all the time and it will never be hard. You'll have full context for breaking changes, and the diff from A to B is always smaller than from A to Q, and less likely to break in strange and confusing ways.

This. Version pinning is just piling on the risk, and when a CVE is announced on the no-longer-supported version you’ve been pinned to for way too long then it’ll be a reactive emergency.

Re: Never update anything

#124

Post by duncan-donuts »

I identify heavily with this but also the inverse —- always update everything (all the time). I don’t run arch anymore but one thing I did enjoy as a daily driver was that I was constantly updating my software. The pain is in the middle where you update things once every year or two (or when forced) and there’s hundreds or thousands of new changes that break your stuff.

Re: Never update anything

#125

Post by secondaryacct »

brailsafe wrote: post #122
secondaryacct wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having always been fullstack even in my current large traditional bank, I see both codebases in Java 6 and maven poms that are a paradise to change (and a java 8 upgrade is often trivial and sufficient to get most of the nice candies you really need), and yarn/npm frontend projects that cant be even rebuilt two weeks later, everyone insanely writing auto updating version descriptor (^2.0.4 with the ^). I cannot under…

If you can have a Java backend that's more or less totally decoupled from the frontend, great. Java and it's tooling are fine, and it's easy to be productive writing in Java. However, my only experience as a frontend dev with Java backend system has been truly nightmarish, because the backend processed all the frontend assets and rendered them. If anything, this is what helped me burnout, because everyone on my team…

Yeah so the dev machine shit specs is something we fight SO HARD against in my bank. There s not many thing we can fight, but our 10 core SMT xeon with 128G of RAM for everyone in the team was a fight worth fighting. Yes, it took 2 years of them putting us on a new VM cloud systems after another before they gave up, us spamming them every say "intellij freezes", "I cant build in less than 10 minutes and the traders are getting nervous we spend our time daydreaming while it compiles" and other such trolls making the budget monkeys sweat.

Other than that, there s probably a way for you to propose a change, ive worked on the same nightmare you describe and, well, I was lucky enough I guess I could make enough changes to both stack it was possible to get either a light java subset running just the frontend to test, or make the js independent for testing, yes with a yarn soup lol, which is how I learned it in the first place I guess.

Re: Never update anything

#126

Post by marcosdumay »

snerbles wrote: post #28
schaefer wrote: post #4

DOS 5.2 ftw

Do what my Tandy 1000 did, and burn DOS 3.3 right to ROM. None of this wimpy flash-but-with-a-read-only-bit, no fancy UV-erasable EEPROM...just honest-to-goodness-blown-fuse ROM. Boots immediately too.

> just honest-to-goodness-blown-fuse ROM

Well, blown-fuse ROM is called PROM. Real ROM is made from hard metal VLSI masks or old ladies weaving copper wires.

Re: Never update anything

#127

Post by motioncuty »

EastSmith wrote: post #106

I feel the pain, seeing non-trivial updates for Ruby, Elasticsearch and Postgres (thanks AWS) this year. Can not agree with the React part though. They keep so many things backward compatible. React 16 is 3, 4 years old now? I've updated pretty big code base from early 16 to latest 16 version painlessly - like in a day. Used some of the available code-modes for some really old part of the project. It worked flawlessl…

What are the benefits to updating frontend packages. Are there security vulnerabilities that I should be worrying about if most of my npm dependecies dont get updated.

Re: Never update anything

#128

Post by jml7c5 »

This is only somewhat related, but I wish semantic versioning had settled on four fields instead of three. A transition from 13.1.2 -> 14.0.0 could be a major update that revamps the API, or a tiny incompatible change. Another field at the front would fix this: major.breaking.feature.bugfix. It would help with the "zero-based versioning" problem where projects sit at 0.y.z forever because there's an aversion to frequently bumping the first number.

Re: Never update anything

#129

Post by jart »

saghm wrote: post #121
jart wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac and Linux do the same thing. I know people who still prefer the OSX 10.3 and the GNOME2 GUIs, or for instance the way nytimes.com looked back in 2010. That's the problem with making GUIs the thing you love. Some goons stop by your home every few years and toss up the furniture. Apple is the gold standard since it pretty much looks the same as it did in the 80's and each major version tunes subtle things. Microsof…

> Mac and Linux do the same thing The earlier responses in the thread were talking about forced upgrades. I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; you can continue to use old packages and even reboot the machine indefinitely. Sure, you might not get security fixes or keep unrelated packages up to date beyond a certain point, but that'…

Force is a strong word, since Windows provides ways to opt-out of feature upgrades. It's also probably possible to opt-out of bug fixes too. If you want to put a rosy spin on things, you could think of it as a free system administration service. There's a lot of people out there who are working really hard, for you, to make sure it goes smoothly. It's also common for Linux distros to use the opt-out model these days too.

Re: Never update anything

#130

Post by Taywee »

tux3 wrote: post #61
Taywee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arbitrary change like deciding that 'which' is deprecated now. I kind of hate that this is going to live on as some example when the actual event was somebody proposing it, it failing in some builds on testing, and then a vote deciding against it. It was an example of good project governing preventing breakage, but for some reason it's already being remembered as the opposite.

The Technical Committee had to step in and vote, so in that sense the last resort worked. But a good migration is a quiet migration. When internal Debian discussions reach the user's stderr and causes builds to fail, the system has failed. There's only two ways to remember this sort of kerfuffle. Not at all, or as a lesson in deprecating things smoothly.

Didn't that only happen in testing? Isn't that the point of a testing release?
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