4 ms·

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

Zababa 5y 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.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  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.
  - powersnail 5y ago
    They endured it. People didn't have personal computers or cell phones a century ago. What happened? Did businesses go extinct? The entire digital empire that we enjoy today is built on people's wants. Some things are wanted so badly, that we are willing to get our hands dirty and actually create new things. It's not hard to imagine that people can want things badly enough to try out those new things.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    Seems like you're arguing that if they didn't go out of business last year from lack of $feature, then they never will. Imagine you run a company selling things and can't offer next-day shipping and none of your competitors does either. The company you use for deliveries announces they support next day shipping now but you have to add a priority flag to requests so they can schedule it differently, and they released a new API client to support that. Your competitors all start offering next-day shipping and you don't. You ask your employees why. The development team says the new API client is unproven and the one you have is stable and you didn't go out of business last year so you probably just have no self control and are demanding the latest shiny and are weak and impulsive. Would you be OK with that reasoning? Or with literally any reason that ended "so we're not offering next day shipping and will definitely lose customers to our competitors because of it."? Or would you start looking for a way you can take the change and isolate it? "We'll run next-day shipping requests through a different queue and watch it more closely", etc.
exyi 5y ago
Maybe they needed it, but the devs only had time for it last month
chias 5y 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.php?f=1&t=33727 https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.ph...
- gmfawcett 5y ago
  You could have just built IM yourself? No need to switch release channels for this. https://imagemagick.org/script/install-source.php https://imagemagick.org/script/install-source.php I used to have a similar version-freshness issue with ffmpeg on Ubuntu, for a video-encoding system I was running. Turns out that building ffmpeg isn't actually that hard. :) Later, I switched to using Nix as a layer over the distro; then I could just build ffmpeg once on my build system, and push the "closure" (the app & all its dependencies) to the other nodes in my encoding farm.
  - chias 5y ago
    Technically you're not wrong, though I will point out that it'd still be running the bleeding-edge unstable ImageMagick by definition. But even so, in practice, building ImageMagick it yourself, along with all configuration and integration into PHP (yes, it was a PHP site) on a production webserver is a much bigger lift than that. And then you have to maintain it manually. Arguably this is a much less stable result than running a bleeding edge Debian install where you just `apt-get install php-imagemagick`.
the_af 5y ago
> How badly do you really need that feature? Very badly. New regulations require this feature or we risk fines. Also we need to support some new hardware. Also we finally discovered a longstanding bug that was losing us money. Also, the business opened a new branch that needs this. > Why did no one need it a couple of years ago? The regulation didn't exist. We didn't understand the bug. The new hardware didn't exist. The new business opportunity hadn't been thought of yet.

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.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
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.
- powersnail 5y ago
  They endured it. People didn't have personal computers or cell phones a century ago. What happened? Did businesses go extinct? The entire digital empire that we enjoy today is built on people's wants. Some things are wanted so badly, that we are willing to get our hands dirty and actually create new things. It's not hard to imagine that people can want things badly enough to try out those new things.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  Seems like you're arguing that if they didn't go out of business last year from lack of $feature, then they never will. Imagine you run a company selling things and can't offer next-day shipping and none of your competitors does either. The company you use for deliveries announces they support next day shipping now but you have to add a priority flag to requests so they can schedule it differently, and they released a new API client to support that. Your competitors all start offering next-day shipping and you don't. You ask your employees why. The development team says the new API client is unproven and the one you have is stable and you didn't go out of business last year so you probably just have no self control and are demanding the latest shiny and are weak and impulsive. Would you be OK with that reasoning? Or with literally any reason that ended "so we're not offering next day shipping and will definitely lose customers to our competitors because of it."? Or would you start looking for a way you can take the change and isolate it? "We'll run next-day shipping requests through a different queue and watch it more closely", etc.

exyi 5y ago

Maybe they needed it, but the devs only had time for it last month

chias 5y 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.php?f=1&t=33727 https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.ph...

gmfawcett 5y ago
You could have just built IM yourself? No need to switch release channels for this. https://imagemagick.org/script/install-source.php https://imagemagick.org/script/install-source.php I used to have a similar version-freshness issue with ffmpeg on Ubuntu, for a video-encoding system I was running. Turns out that building ffmpeg isn't actually that hard. :) Later, I switched to using Nix as a layer over the distro; then I could just build ffmpeg once on my build system, and push the "closure" (the app & all its dependencies) to the other nodes in my encoding farm.
- chias 5y ago
  Technically you're not wrong, though I will point out that it'd still be running the bleeding-edge unstable ImageMagick by definition. But even so, in practice, building ImageMagick it yourself, along with all configuration and integration into PHP (yes, it was a PHP site) on a production webserver is a much bigger lift than that. And then you have to maintain it manually. Arguably this is a much less stable result than running a bleeding edge Debian install where you just `apt-get install php-imagemagick`.

the_af 5y ago

> How badly do you really need that feature? Very badly. New regulations require this feature or we risk fines. Also we need to support some new hardware. Also we finally discovered a longstanding bug that was losing us money. Also, the business opened a new branch that needs this. > Why did no one need it a couple of years ago? The regulation didn't exist. We didn't understand the bug. The new hardware didn't exist. The new business opportunity hadn't been thought of yet.