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Life is too short to depend on unstable software

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Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#31

Post by md8z »

hsn915 wrote: post #28
exyi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often times you can get a support for a stable OSS, and then you actually help the ecosystem by giving it resources

Unfortunately, the "pay for support" business model means the incentive is to make a system that needs support but pretends on the surface to be stable and high quality. One way to make a system so incomprehensible that your customers absolutely need support is to make it configurable in a million different ways, and make the configuration invisible / opaque. Example: "Why is this program doing this when I told it to…

I don't understand, isn't the original complaint here that everything needs support eventually?

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#32

Post by blondin »

we believed that continuous integration/continuous deployment (ci/cd) will only bring good. but we started optimizing for metrics such as profit, ignoring actual customer issues.

we started solving issues that are not real customers issues.

people claim that software in the past was very unstable. sure, but let's start putting some context and numbers around these claims. or at least cite such software. in fact, let's do a quick mental exercise for those of us who have been there.

winamp vs. any current music "player".

in quotes, because most modern music apps can go around the entire web but can't often play music. i can't remember when i ever had any issue with winamp. so let me know if your experience was different.

winamp played "my" music. i don't know where the music these modern apps play is coming from. i must have bought them at some point. sometimes i don't remember when because they use so many user interface dark patterns. so many problems at each release or update these days that i want them to stop releasing.

on the other hand, they can't (or don't want to) solve real long-standing customer issues. every year there is a new round of "missing cover art"[0] issues opened for itunes / apple music.

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+music+cover+art+missin...

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#33

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Zababa wrote: post #29
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How badly do you really need that feature? Why did no one need it a couple of years ago?

Most of the time people that need the feature are not the same as people that will be in charge of developing the feature. I doubt most people also have the leverage to conving the business that they don't need the feature.

But what did they do about it a year ago? They didn’t have the option of using an unstable version (because the feature still wouldn’t have been there), so what happened? Did they go out of business?

IMO, the “bleeding edge” is just overly tempting and people need to learn to resist it. It’s hard to know for sure when we’re speaking in hypotheticals, but I think that in most cases, the trade-offs aren’t being weighed accurately.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#35

Post by chias »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5
the_af wrote: post #4

In theory we all mostly agree with this: stable, well understood software is to be preferred. In practice , it's not true most businesses or teams want newer software just to be "on the bleeding edge". The bleeding edge is not a goal on its own. What usually happens is that you need a feature (for actual business reasons) that is not available in the older version of the software you are using; or there is a serious…

How badly do you really need that feature? Why did no one need it a couple of years ago?

Because sometimes "stable" software has bugs.

A true story about one of my websites: It runs on Debian Stable, because I like stability and at the time, Debian was the OS I was most familiar with. It also does a lot of image manipulation, for which it uses ImageMagick.

In March of 2018, I discover a bug in ImageMagick: if you perform various hue/saturation modulations, sometimes pixels just turn "black" for no reason -- essentially it looks like someone sprinkled sand on the image. Reported here [1]. Apparently some code ends up with a divide-by-zero error. The good news is that the bug is fixed within a day, and is released to the beta version one day after that.

My website is quite literally built around image layering, manipulation, and generation. My users are experiencing what looks like sand thrown on their images every day. So what do I do? Do I assure my users that stable software is actually good and they should just sit tight for a year or two (or more?) until a version containing this patch hits the Debian Stable repos? Do I rewrite the core of my application to replace ImageMagick? Or do I update to run some unstable software?

[1]: https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.ph...

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#36

Post by ludocode »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #18
the_af wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal use, here's the same thing again. Say a Linux user wants to play a game. The stable old version of their distro doesn't play well with the libs/drivers needed to play the game. So the user must install a newer, less tested, distro. But the goal was not to be "on the bleeding edge" for its own sake; it's playing the game, and there's no other (easy) way.

This is a flaw in Linux Desktops' choice of application management paradigms, which insists that everything be tightly coupled and managed. It is entirely possible and reasonable to have a stable set of base system libraries everyone can depend on and otherwise applications must bring their own.

It's not just possible and reasonable. It's how literally every other platform works.

It's also how the Linux Standard Base worked. It was intended to be a stable well-defined backwards-compatible set of libraries common across distributions. Of course the LSB had its share of problems but they had the right idea to bring stability to Linux as a platform for binary apps.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#37

Post by hsn915 »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #30
hsn915 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for confirmin that "Free and Open Source" does not value stability or quality. I'd rather pay for a closed program that comes with guarantees of stability and quality than participate in a community that considers these concerns tertiarty or off the menu entirely.

This is an absurd sweeping generalization. There are many FOSS projects that value stability and quality. Just like there are many closed source projects that don’t.

The only one I'm aware of that does a good job of this is the Go language project, but it's not really your typical FOSS project; it's a Google project, and Google relies on it internally, so the incentive to make it stable and high quality is as high as it will ever get. They don't sell it to others, but they themselves rely on it as a core part of their own business.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#38

Post by hsn915 »

md8z wrote: post #31
hsn915 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the "pay for support" business model means the incentive is to make a system that needs support but pretends on the surface to be stable and high quality. One way to make a system so incomprehensible that your customers absolutely need support is to make it configurable in a million different ways, and make the configuration invisible / opaque. Example: "Why is this program doing this when I told it to…

I don't understand, isn't the original complaint here that everything needs support eventually?

Everything should not need support. The fact that most everything needs support is a symptom of how crazy the software industry is.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#39

Post by xwdv »

I believe it’s exactly the opposite, life is too short to wait around for stable software.

Don’t expect code to be like a cathedral that can stand the test of time, think of it more like an adhoc bazaar where you can quickly setup shop and start making money. Yea sometimes it will not work right or break, but even physical things in this world that people depend on are also shitty and break. Shitty things are just part of the imperfect human condition, and we must live our lives oscillating between stability and instability, until of course we die and it all means nothing in the end.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#40

Post by mathgladiator »

blondin wrote: post #32

we believed that continuous integration/continuous deployment (ci/cd) will only bring good. but we started optimizing for metrics such as profit, ignoring actual customer issues. we started solving issues that are not real customers issues. people claim that software in the past was very unstable. sure, but let's start putting some context and numbers around these claims. or at least cite such software. in fact, let'…

The big difference between WinAmp versus the current state is content availability. While I believe WinAmp is much better than Amazon Music, my WinAmp was full of "questionable content" whilst I have no anxiety around using a streaming service.

The problem that I have with Amazon Music isn't the occasional need to restart the tab, but the lack of selection which my wife needs as part of the They Might Be Giants fan club which sends her stuff which isn't available on Amazon Music. I used to be able to upload it until they removed it. Sonos's software integration with my NAS was lack-luster with a surprising number of issues of "why isn't song X on it?!"

My goal prior to my wife's next birthday is to setup a myalexamedia on a VM/S3 which I can turn on/off quickly to save pennies!

Content and integration with either my Alexa speakers or Sonos are what is making quality an issue.

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