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This is a bit more than a simple PR move as I initially thought after reading the article submitted in OP. They take steps to ensure redundancy, recoverability,
by orbital-decay 6y ago
This is a bit more than a simple PR move as I initially thought after reading the article submitted in OP. They take steps to ensure redundancy, recoverability, durability, and much more. They work with the experts who know the problem by heart.
Still, the main question remains. Computer programs are extremely volatile by nature, they are written for the constantly changing media, and need huge amounts of context to be useful for future generations. Will a snapshot of the Linux kernel be useful in 100 years? 1000 years? After some global disaster? Even if you don't intend to run it (which requires archiving the current state of the supported platforms and much more), how much additional work will be needed to simply read it for studying?
>After the Challenger disaster, a hunt for the blueprints of the abandoned Saturn V rocket ensued. They were largely recovered, thanks to the work of archivists.
Yet nobody can build another Saturn V today with these blueprints. Any complex product is much more than just a set of blueprints. It's an organized process that depends on a certain team of people, supply chain, existing infrastructure, and much much more. Useful products only exist when they are supported.
- ben0x539 6y agoidk about you but if I were a hyper-advanced singularity hive mind entity from the year 12,020, I'd get a huge kick out of scrolling through some archive of those adorable entry-level not-even-sapient programs our ancestors wrote in antiquity.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI bet in 12,020, we'll still be waiting for Ruby 3.
- nurettin 6y agoDon't know what features you're looking for, but the roadmap in their issue tracker says it is due in about 5 months. https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-master/roadmap#3.0 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-master/roadmap#3.0
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoMostly joking. It's just been in the works for a while now.
- linkdd 6y agoI bet NetBSD will still run on their hardware.
- fsociety 6y agoI’m not sure if it will be useful, but re: blueprints if they really snapshotted everything on GitHub then I’d bet it can be used to an almost full extent. All the dependencies will be on there either directly or indirectly.
- contingencies 6y agoYour point is valid however a distinction should be drawn between the technology used to access the data, any technology to actually build and run the described programs, and the data (source code) itself. The code, being largely high level language algorithm descriptions and associated documentation, should be relatively comprehensible without a compiler or execution environment.
- shripadk 6y ago> Yet nobody can build another Saturn V today with these blueprints. Any complex product is much more than just a set of blueprints. It's an organized process that depends on a certain team of people, supply chain, existing infrastructure, and much much more. Useful products only exist when they are supported. This is so true. It is not easy to replace humans. Especially if it included a group of experts who all had in depth knowledge of not just the technology but also the process involved. It is not easy to document everything and we have to accept the fact that somethings are lost in translation. While documenting we typically assume that some of it is common sense and omit explaining the steps/process in depth. But over time, things change/evolve and what was common sense back in the day is lost due to passage of time.