3 ms·

maturity of a project definitely matters; in larger businesses, the maturity of a product and how long it's had to "get past the teething stage" is very importa

by csydas 3y ago

maturity of a project definitely matters; in larger businesses, the maturity of a product and how long it's had to "get past the teething stage" is very important, and for projects with public repos/issue trackers, you can get a nice feel for how the devs handle critical bugs going into it, or check if a major pain point for you has come up before and how they handled it. the article is a call to get you comfortable picking/using BSD, and from my point of view it's reasonable to advertise its maturity.

paulnpace 3y ago
I'm not a professional in any of this, but just from reading comments it appears that devs seem to prefer the latest, greatest, coolest thing while admins seem to prefer the oldest, robustest, boringest thing.
- themadturk 3y ago
  Can't speak for devs, but admins definitely prefer old, robust and boring. Smart devs prefer admins with these preferences, though they might not be conscious of it.
- csydas 3y ago
  I can completely get that understanding; I'm not enough of a programmer to really make sense of a lot of low level code, but enough that I can understand the type of issues they've solved and how they did it. I suspect you are correct because newest and greatest typically solve a problem, and that's the focus for the devs. the more senior devs I know take an "optimistic but cautious" approach, while less experienced devs/non-devs typically just see an answer to their particular problem and want to use it, as defending the use and the few broken instances is typically easier than solving the issue without the latest and greatest. and I can get that easily admins probably like old and trusted because boring is exciting for them; for a few of the systems I admin, it's great to have a few on debian/bsd where they've proven that I don't need to babysit these systems; they're never fully out of the equation when troubleshooting, but it comes up rarely, and if worst comes to worst, a reboot on these systems is typically so fast and non-disruptive that it's an easy decision, which often helps and then the issue never returns. sure it's not good that I had to reboot, but a down time of 10 seconds while I boot and it never comes up again is appealing.
- sbuk 3y ago
  Devs on Hacker News. You'll find many outside of this bubble that either don't care, don't know about it or are happy with their tools.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Code is maintenance heavy and tends to have interdependencies on other related code. Eg, I wouldn't use qt4 today because it's dead, so if something is wrong with it it's now my problem to figure out how to fix it. Meanwhile qt6 is under active use and development, so I'm much more likely to find help and bug fixes, and developer interest. And it's less likely to say, stop building because cmake deprecated some ancient feature, or uses some ancient and now incompatible library.

by csydas 3y ago

paulnpace 3y ago

I'm not a professional in any of this, but just from reading comments it appears that devs seem to prefer the latest, greatest, coolest thing while admins seem to prefer the oldest, robustest, boringest thing.

themadturk 3y ago
Can't speak for devs, but admins definitely prefer old, robust and boring. Smart devs prefer admins with these preferences, though they might not be conscious of it.
csydas 3y ago
I can completely get that understanding; I'm not enough of a programmer to really make sense of a lot of low level code, but enough that I can understand the type of issues they've solved and how they did it. I suspect you are correct because newest and greatest typically solve a problem, and that's the focus for the devs. the more senior devs I know take an "optimistic but cautious" approach, while less experienced devs/non-devs typically just see an answer to their particular problem and want to use it, as defending the use and the few broken instances is typically easier than solving the issue without the latest and greatest. and I can get that easily admins probably like old and trusted because boring is exciting for them; for a few of the systems I admin, it's great to have a few on debian/bsd where they've proven that I don't need to babysit these systems; they're never fully out of the equation when troubleshooting, but it comes up rarely, and if worst comes to worst, a reboot on these systems is typically so fast and non-disruptive that it's an easy decision, which often helps and then the issue never returns. sure it's not good that I had to reboot, but a down time of 10 seconds while I boot and it never comes up again is appealing.
sbuk 3y ago
Devs on Hacker News. You'll find many outside of this bubble that either don't care, don't know about it or are happy with their tools.
dale_glass 3y ago
Code is maintenance heavy and tends to have interdependencies on other related code. Eg, I wouldn't use qt4 today because it's dead, so if something is wrong with it it's now my problem to figure out how to fix it. Meanwhile qt6 is under active use and development, so I'm much more likely to find help and bug fixes, and developer interest. And it's less likely to say, stop building because cmake deprecated some ancient feature, or uses some ancient and now incompatible library.