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> nothing but maintenance. It's not something to be proud of What? Absolutely! Maintenance is hard. Maintenance of old/big/complex systems is even harder. Main

> nothing but maintenance. It's not something to be proud of What? Absolutely! Maintenance is hard. Maintenance of old/big/complex systems is even harder. Maintaining something for so long with substantial user base is definitely something to be proud for. Everything doesn't need to constantly add features in order for people to be proud of their work. Just adding bug/security fixes once you feel something is feature-complete is also OK. Not sure where this constant need for changes is coming from, but each to their own. But to look down on people who are doing maintenance is a real shitty thing to do. I hope you don't work together with others in open source, as they'll also feel saddened by your comment that they should not be proud unless they work on new features.

nickserv 6y ago
Having maintained some old open source codebases, I can say that just keeping up with bitrot is at least 1/3 the workload. New versions of the OS, the language, the libraries, etc is not a minor thing to keep track of and update.
emptysongglass 6y ago
I think you've run off with the ball a bit here. I have plenty of respect for maintainers. To the example we're addressing, of OpenOffice: nothing but maintenance is the big deal here. Maintenance is hard, yes but you can also find a developer or two to push the ball ahead a bit and Apache hasn't seen fit to do even that.
- capableweb 6y ago
  I don't think I have. You say your respect it but then say "nothing but maintenance is the big deal here". My point was, nothing but maintenance is OK too, and sometimes even favorable, depending on what you're working on. As an example, the software behind HN is pretty much maintenance-only for as long as I've been lurking here. While there is bug fixes sometimes, I don't think there been any new features the last few years. You don't think the people running the HN software should be proud of that?

nickserv 6y ago

Having maintained some old open source codebases, I can say that just keeping up with bitrot is at least 1/3 the workload. New versions of the OS, the language, the libraries, etc is not a minor thing to keep track of and update.

emptysongglass 6y ago

I think you've run off with the ball a bit here. I have plenty of respect for maintainers. To the example we're addressing, of OpenOffice: nothing but maintenance is the big deal here. Maintenance is hard, yes but you can also find a developer or two to push the ball ahead a bit and Apache hasn't seen fit to do even that.

capableweb 6y ago
I don't think I have. You say your respect it but then say "nothing but maintenance is the big deal here". My point was, nothing but maintenance is OK too, and sometimes even favorable, depending on what you're working on. As an example, the software behind HN is pretty much maintenance-only for as long as I've been lurking here. While there is bug fixes sometimes, I don't think there been any new features the last few years. You don't think the people running the HN software should be proud of that?