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Never update anything

blog.kronis.dev

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Re: Never update anything

#211

Post by capableweb »

nuerow wrote: post #209
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…

> I cannot understand what idiot thought it d be fancy cutting everything into mini dependencies that update every day without you knowing made by amateurish hipsters who transitive depend on each other like their life depended on it. I'm not sure you're thought things through in your comment, and that you are being fair or reasonable. No one cuts "everything into mini dependendencies". You have dependencies you reus…

> With JavaScript/NodeJS + npm you only shoot yourself in the foot that way if you purposely aim at your foot, remove the safety, and press the trigger really hard.

Eh, no. You'll get shot no matter what, even if you have no gun.

For example, let's imagine you now have your version locked down codebase and after a month you want to install a new package. This one is only compatible with XYZ V1 while what you have is V2. No worries, npm will just handle that right? Well, you'll have both versions, but the prototype constructor name changed from V1 to V2, so the versions won't work together, so now you need to upgrade XYZ V1 everywhere anyways. And when XYZ did the V1->V2 upgrade, they also upgraded to GKS V53, so now you need to also do that upgrade.

Continue ad-infinitum or simply stay away from a broken ecosystem.

Re: Never update anything

#212

Post by kaba0 »

Aeolun wrote: post #176
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…

Do your Java geezers work with Maven? Give me NPM (well, yarn, or pnpm) any day of the week.

Nah, maven is definitely not a modern tool, but it does what it has to. And java’s package situation is in orders of magnitude better health than the critical vulnerability each week js one. Like, maven repo was the only one not affected by that quite big attack last time as well.

Re: Never update anything

#213

Post by GrumpySloth »

lwouis wrote: post #175
jml7c5 wrote: post #128

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 frequ…

"Breaking" is undefinable. I remember reading about some user complaining that a small bugfix broke their work setup because it fixed a bug that used to make the CPU go 100% when the spacebar was held. The user would hold it with a weight and get the CPU to make heat that way. The small fix broke his experience. There are many other examples of this. Breaking compatibility by fixing bugs people rely on for instance.…

> "Breaking" is undefinable. I remember reading about some user complaining that a small bugfix broke their work setup because it fixed a bug that used to make the CPU go 100% when the spacebar was held. The user would hold it with a weight and get the CPU to make heat that way. The small fix broke his experience.

You confused XKCD with reality: https://xkcd.com/1172/>

Re: Never update anything

#214

Post by xet7 »

distalx wrote: post #149
andrei_says_ wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I can’t use anything too complicated. I’m just not smart enough to wrangle complex configurations and dependencies. So I keep producing Rails apps that get the job done without the bells and whistles and without much polish. I wish I could hire a config expert for half an hour and have them create the setup I want. Because I will never get my masters in webpack/rollup/postcss/stimulusjs/mystery sauce work…

Checkout meteor.js, it takes care of all the tooling.

No, Meteor does not take care of all. If someone would help me to upgrade to newest Meteor etc dependencies, it would be very welcome:

https://github.com/wekan/wekan/issues/3881

Re: Never update anything

#215

Post by RedShift1 »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #155
romwell wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I loved and lived Windows for a decade I know it's probably a typo, but I can't help but imagine the wonderful OS that Windows 6 never was :)

Not sure where the supposed typo is, I started with 3.11, then used 95, NT4, 98, 2k, and around XP/Vista is where I realized it's time to move on because of the increasing upgrade nags and the UI being changed without my consent... I still stuck around until Windows 7 because I had just grown so into it, was very comfortable with keyboard controls, etc. Then a computer I knew upgraded itself to Windows 8 without bein…

There was never any free and forced upgrade to Windows 8, I assume you mean Windows 10?

Re: Never update anything

#216

Post by nuerow »

capableweb wrote: post #211
nuerow wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot understand what idiot thought it d be fancy cutting everything into mini dependencies that update every day without you knowing made by amateurish hipsters who transitive depend on each other like their life depended on it. I'm not sure you're thought things through in your comment, and that you are being fair or reasonable. No one cuts "everything into mini dependendencies". You have dependencies you reus…

> With JavaScript/NodeJS + npm you only shoot yourself in the foot that way if you purposely aim at your foot, remove the safety, and press the trigger really hard. Eh, no. You'll get shot no matter what, even if you have no gun. For example, let's imagine you now have your version locked down codebase and after a month you want to install a new package. This one is only compatible with XYZ V1 while what you have is…

> (...) after a month you want to install a new package.

What's your point? If you want to update a dependency then you also need to go through all their dependencies. This is not a javascript/npm problem; it's a software development problem. Dependencies don't get magically updated, even with semver. You experience the exact same problem with other tech stacks. I'm fact, I've experienced this problem far more with C++ projects than with JavaScript/typescript ones.

Why are we expecting and demanding random updates to work with JavaScript/npm when that belief and expectation was always totally unrealistic with any other stack?

Re: Never update anything

#217

Post by xet7 »

k__ wrote: post #72

Android: We update your system until it's too slow to use. Also, Android: One day we will stop giving you updates, so your apps can't talk to new versions of online services anymore.

Android, iOS, macOS, Windows: Newest version only works on newest hardware. Old hardware not supported anymore.

So, for old hardware:

- Install Linux to desktop/laptop computers

- Install Ubuntu Touch to smartphone, if available

Re: Never update anything

#218

Post by sul_tasto »

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…

This is why I don’t understand the approach of golang and rust to keep their APIs so lean and rely on 3rd party dependency management for (IMO) basic enterprise functionality.

Re: Never update anything

#219

Post by SergeAx »

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…

This is not "modern stack", this is frontend frameworks niche.

Re: Never update anything

#220

Post by kaba0 »

jart wrote: post #154
kouteiheika wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux do the same thing. [..] Then there's Linux where each GUI update is a radical break with tradition that continually reinvents its own identity. If you're using a "mainstream" desktop environment (e.g. GNOME), then yeah, but that's not universally true. I've been using exactly the same desktop environment for something like ~12 years; I love Linux because if you set it up right it's essentially zero maintenanc…

The forced changes to the init system and desktop gui are far more radical than anything Microsoft or Apple ever did. The init system change was also due to the GUI people. GNOME told everyone they must adopt SystemD or else you can't use GNOME anymore. It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides. If a system administrator woke up from a 15 year coma, they would have no clue how to use any…

Come on, let’s stop this bullshit about systemd. It was goddamn voted on multiple times by debian maintainers, in a system that is markedly more democratic than anything we have in a country, and won with huge margins.

Also, previous incarnations were hard to maintain, had no logging before the mount of filesystems, had ill-defined service life cycle, etc. Booting is a hard problem. Having it all around the system in million shitty bash script is a ridiculous idea. Make it declarative as much as possible and have it handled by a single core program. And systemd does these perfectly, my only gripe with it is that it should not have been written in C, but such is everything in linux land.

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