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If releases are painful, then something is wrong with your development cycle and deployment process. If you spend the effort to make it painless, then it makes
by nwah1 7y ago
If releases are painful, then something is wrong with your development cycle and deployment process. If you spend the effort to make it painless, then it makes no difference whether releases are 6 weeks or 4 weeks.
Of course, you need an extensive battery of unit tests and integration tests, and lots of user testing in beta. But actually if you're only deploying smaller self-contained changes then there's less moving parts at any given time. You'll have stronger guarantees of less interactions.
- WoodenChair 7y agoYou're addressing the pain for the developer but not the pain for the user and society more largely. The user (who may be on a slow internet connection) has to deal with the bandwidth of the more frequent downloads. Society has to deal with additional network congestion costs and electricity usage.
- nwah1 7y agoTrue, but by using binary deltas you can minimize that cost. And failure to upgrade may mean running more inefficient algorithms, wasting more processor cycles, or transferring more data in general. For instance, if you are on a browser that doesn't support Brotli compression then you'll miss out on the dramatic compression improvements provided by that algorithm.
- xg15 7y agoIt also means more effort for people who have to validate the changes downstream for potential problems - e.g. extension developers or package maintainers.
- nwah1 7y agoAgree with that, also, but there's no reason why their processes couldn't be just as streamlined.
- naniwaduni 7y agoThere are plenty of reasons their processes can't be as streamlined as an organization with hundreds of millions of dollars of resources.
- JohnFen 7y ago> may mean running more inefficient algorithms, wasting more processor cycles, or transferring more data in general. Quite often, missing those sorts of improvements isn't a big deal. That depends on the nature of the software in question, though.
- Khoth 7y agoIn my experience I'm more likely to be running more inefficient algorithms, wasting more processor cycles, or transferring more data in general if I do upgrade software than if I don't.