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Never Update Anything

blog.kronis.dev

1–10 of 121 posts

Re: Never Update Anything

#5
> Not only that, but put anything and everything you will ever need within the standard library or one or two large additional libraries.

you can definitely do that with python today: assemble a large group of packages that conver a large fraction of what people need to do, and maintain that as the 1 or 2 big packages. nobody's stopping you.

Re: Never Update Anything

#6

"Never Update Anything" Author proceeds to add to two updates to the article, epic troll.

These days it makes sense to life-cycle entire container images rather than maintain applications with their dependencies.

The current BSOD epidemic demonstrated the folly of mass concurrent versioning.

*nix admins are used to playing upgrade Chicken with their uptime scores. lol =)

Re: Never Update Anything

#8
"In my eyes it could be pretty nice to have a framework version that's supported for 10-20 years and is so stable that it can be used with little to no changes for the entire expected lifetime of a system."

This is what applications used to be like, before the web and internet hit and regular or even push updating became easy.

It was simply so difficult and expensive to provide updates once the software was in the customer's hands that it was done intentionally and infrequently. For the most part, you bought software, installed it, and used it. That was it. It never changed, unless you bought it again in a newer version

Re: Never Update Anything

#9
Kinda weird to see Java over Go, when the former is basically an entirely new language from what it was 10 years ago and the latter has made it an explicit goal to never break older versions and (almost) never change the core language.

Re: Never Update Anything

#10
Oh hey, I was wondering why the VPS suddenly had over 100 load average, restarted Docker since the containers were struggling, now I know why (should be back now for a bit). Won't necessarily fix it, might need to migrate over to something else for the blog, with a proper cache, alongside actually writing better articles in the future.

I don't think the article itself holds up that well, it's just that updates are often a massive pain, one that you have to deal with somehow regardless. Realistically, LTS versions of OS distros and technologies that don't change often will lessen the pain, but not eliminate it entirely.

And even then, you'll still need to deal with breaking changes when you will be forced to upgrade across major releases (e.g. JDK 8 to something newer after EOL) or migrate once a technology dies altogether (e.g. AngularJS).

It's not like people will backport fixes for anything indefinitely either.

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