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I don't get this cult of newness thing. To me there's no shame in a library being "done". If the maintainer abandoned it and it's working to your satisfaction

• jjav 4y ago
  > I don't get this cult of newness thing. To me there's no shame in a library being "done". Exactly! There is nothing better than a library that's truly done. That's rare, sure, but it's the ideal state. All bugs are fixed, it does exactly what it set out to do and it is stable since it never needs to change again. If only all my dependencies could forever be libraries that are done!
• bhaak 4y ago
  It's not about newness thing. It's about software bit rot. Every piece of software lives in an ecosystem. Libraries even more so. Unless the ecosystem is dead, there are always small changes over time until the code is outdated and should be replaced or redone. This has happened with lockfile. It has been superseded and shouldn't be used anymore. You say if it ain't broken don't fix it. That's only reasonable if you can say with 100% certainty that it won't break ever in the future. Otherwise you're building software debt.
• bigiain 4y ago
  I agree, but in my opinion you shouldn’t be downloading it from PyPI every time you use it in that case, or one day you’ll end up leftpad.js-ed or node-ipc-ed. It can be hard to work out when it’s the right time to commit a “done” version of a dependancy into your own repo, but the risks of not doing so are real and have bitten many people.