3 ms·
People often conflate stability with stagnation. When you have poorly written software, then old versions of it are "stable" only because people have already l
by pornel 5y ago
People often conflate stability with stagnation.
When you have poorly written software, then old versions of it are "stable" only because people have already learned how to live with and work around its obvious bugs. Updating means learning to live with new bugs, which is seen as instability, but it's just the same software again.
OTOH if you're dealing with reliable software with a low defect rate, then all versions are "stable". Updating it isn't painful, and you can expect it to improve things without introducing new bugs.
For example: autotools is "stable", but in the stagnant sense. I use it by googling weird error messages. OTOH cargo is "stable" in the well-tested sense. The newer the better. I can use its nightly build and expect it to work with my every project.
- jart 5y agoWould you call TeX or Bash stagnant? They have a few commits per year. Some projects are like Michelangelo's David where they arch toward completion. At which point the game usually becomes inventing new stuff on top of it, like LaTeX. It's a good model for a gift economy like open source and less disruptive than things like the Python 2 to 3 transition.