5 ms·

The person having to maintain this must be in a world of hurt. Unless they found someone who really likes doing this kind of thing? Still, maintaining such an o

The person having to maintain this must be in a world of hurt. Unless they found someone who really likes doing this kind of thing? Still, maintaining such an old codebase while the rest of the world moves on...ugh...

SoftTalker 11mo ago
Some people just want a job, they don’t wrap up their sense of self worth in it.
- lukan 11mo ago
  Nothing to do with self worth, it is a meaningful job, but a fun one?
  - cyber_kinetist 11mo ago
    Not all jobs are fun, but they can be bearable if meaningful enough (whether that being useful for other people, or even just provide a living wage to support your family)
  - wjnc 11mo ago
    Clear mission, a well set up team and autonomy in execution can make most jobs fun to do? Stress (due to), lack of autonomy, lack of clear mission and bad teams and management I think are the root of unhappy work?
pram 11mo ago
On the other hand: dealing with 14.04 is practically cutting edge compared to stuff still using AIX and HPUX, which were outdated even 20 years ago lol
- wkat4242 11mo ago
  It's because they stopped development in the late 90s. Before Windows 95 (Chicago) came out, HP-UX with VUE was really cutting edge. IBM kinda screwed it up when they created CDE out of it though. And besides the GUI, all unixes were way more cutting edge than anything windows except NT. Only when that went mainstream with XP it became serious. I know your 20 year timeframe is after XP's release, but I just wanted to point out there was a time when the unixes were way ahead. You could even get common software like WP, Lotus 123 and even internet explorer and the consumer outlook (i forget the name) for them in the late 90s.
  - muterad_murilax 11mo ago
    > IBM kinda screwed it up when they created CDE out of it though. Could you please elaborate?
    - wkat4242 11mo ago
      VUE was really "happy", clean. Sans-serif fonts. Cool colours. Funny design like a HP logo and on/off button on the dock. IBM made it super suit and tie. Geriatric colour schemes with dark colours, formal serif fonts and anything cool removed. Functionally it was the same (even two or three features were added) but it went from "designed for people" to "designed for business". Like everything that IBM got their hands on in those days (these days they make nothing of consequence anymore anyway, they're just a consulting firm). It was really disappointing to me when we got the "upgrade". And HP was really dismissive of VUE because they wanted to protect their collaboration deal. I think 10.30 was peak HP-UX. 11 and 11i were the decline.
- egorfine 11mo ago
  Well I look at it from the relativistic perspective. See, AIX or HPUX are frozen in time and there is no temptation whatsoever within those two environments. Being stuck in Ubuntu 14.04 you can actually take a look out the window and see what you are missing by being stuck in the past. It hurts.
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  Aix is still getting new releases, don't mix it up with HP-UX.
kijin 11mo ago
> Unless they found someone who really likes doing this kind of thing? There are more people like that than one might think. There's a sizable community of people who still play old video games. There are people who meticulously maintain 100 year old cars, restore 500 year old works of art, and find their passion in exploring 1000 year old buildings. The HN front page still gets regular posts lamenting loss of the internet culture of the 80s and 90s, trying to bring back what they perceive as lost. I'm sure there are a number of bearded dudes who would commit themselves to keeping an old distro alive, just for the sake of not having to deal with systemd for example.
- bpye 11mo ago
  > There's a sizable community of people who still play old video games. I went to the effort of reverse engineering part of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 to add a resizeable windowed mode and fix it's behaviour with high poll rate mice... It can definitely be interesting to make old games behave on newer platforms.
  - bfkwlfkjf 11mo ago
    Search YouTube for "gog noclip documentary", without quotes. Right up your alley.
- throwaway7356 11mo ago
  > I'm sure there are a number of bearded dudes who would commit themselves to keeping an old distro alive, just for the sake of not having to deal with systemd for example. I don't think so: there are Debian forks that aspire to fight against the horrors of GNOME, systemd, Wayland and Rust, but they don't attract people to work on them.
  - bradfa 11mo ago
    That there are so many indicates to me the opposite. There are lots of people who want to work on that kind of thing, just they all have slightly different opinions as to which part is the part they’re fighting against, hence so many different forks. The forks are all volunteer projects (except Ubuntu), so having slightly different opinions isn’t considering capitalism as a driving force.
al_borland 11mo ago
Most people I know don’t like chasing the latest framework that everyone will forget about in 6 months.
asteroidburger 11mo ago
You're not adding new features and such like that. Just patching security vulnerabilities in a forked branch. Sure, you won't get the niceties of modern developments, but at least you have access to all of the source code and a working development environment.
- worthless-trash 11mo ago
  As someone who actively maintains old rhel, the development environment is something you can drag forward. The biggest problem is fixing security flaws with patches that dont have 'simple' fixes. I imagine that they are going to have problems with accurately determining vulnerability in older code bases where code is similar, but not the same.
  - littlestymaar 11mo ago
    > I imagine that they are going to have problems with accurately determining vulnerability in older code bases where code is similar, but not the same. That sounds like a fun job actually.
    - fweimer 11mo ago
      If you can find the patches, it's fun to tweak them in the most conservative way possible to apply to the old code base. However, things get annoying once something ends up on some priority list (like the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list from CISA), you ship the software in a much older version, and there is no reproducer and no isolated patch. What do you do then? Rebase to get the alleged fix? You can't even tell if the vulnerability was present in the previous version.
      - worthless-trash 11mo ago
        This guy backports.
      - littlestymaar 11mo ago
        > However, things get annoying once something ends up on some priority list (like the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list from CISA), you ship the software in a much older version, and there is no reproducer There are known exploited vulnerabilities without PoC? TIL and that doesn't sound fun at all indeed.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 11mo ago
Maybe I'm the odd one out but I love doing stuff that has long term stability written all over it. In fact the IT world moving as fast as it does is one of my major frustrations. Professionally I have to keep up so I'm reading myself absolutely silly but it is getting to the point where I expect that one of these days I'll end up being surprised because a now 'well known technique' was completely unknown to me.
- bionsystem 11mo ago
  I agree. We are going as far as being asked to release our public app on self-hosted kube cluster in 9 months, with no kube experience and nobody with a CKA in a 2.5 person ops team. "Just do it it's easy" is the name of the game now, if you fail you're bad, if you offer stability and respect delivery dates you are out-fashioned, and the discussion comes back every week and every warning and concern is ignored. I remember a long time ago one of our client was a bank, they had 2 datacenters with a LACP router, SPARC machines, Solaris, VxFS, Sybase, Java app. They survived 20 years with app, OS and hardware upgrades and 0 second of downtime. And I get lectured by a 3 years old developer that I should know better.
  - nubinetwork 11mo ago
    > "just do it, its easy" If its that easy, then why aren't they doing it instead of you? Yeah, I thought so.
    - le-mark 11mo ago
      > "just do it, its easy" This is where devops came from. Developers saw admins and said I can do that in code! Every time egotistical, eager to please developers say something is easy, business says ok, do it. This is also where agile (developers doing project management) comes from.
- lucideer 11mo ago
  > I love doing stuff that has long term stability written all over it I also love doing stuff that has long term stability written all over it. In my 20 year career of trying to do that through various roles, I've learnt that it comes with a number of prerequisites: 1. Minimising & controlling your dependencies. Ensuring code you own is stable long term is an entirely different task to ensuring upstream code continues to be available & functional. Pinning only goes sofar when it comes to CVEs. 2. Start from scratch. The effort to bring an inherited codebase that was explicitly not written with longevity in mind into line with your own standards may seem like a fun challenge, but it becomes less fun at a certain scale. 3. Scale. If you're doing anything in (1) & (2) to any extent, keep it small. Absolutely none of the above is remotely applicable to a project like Ubuntu.
ahartmetz 11mo ago
IME (do note, the things I've dealt with were obsolete for a much shorter time), such work isn't particularly ugly even though the idea of it is. Some of it will feel like cheating because you just need to paraphrase a fix, some of it will be difficult because critical parts don't exist yet. Maybe you'll get to implement a tiny version of a new feature.
2b3a51 11mo ago
I'm wondering how the maintenance effort would be organised. Would it be existing teams in the main functional areas (networking, file systems, user space tools, kernel, systemd &c) keeping the packages earmarked as 'legacy add-on' as they age out of the usual LTS, old LTS, oldold LTS and so on? Or would it in fact be a special team so people spending most of their working week on the legacy add-on? Does Canonical have teams that map to each release, tracking it down through the stages or do they have functional teams that work on streams of packages that age through?
randomtoast 11mo ago
I guess they are betting that AI can semi-auto patch this distro for 15 years.
- kasabali 11mo ago
  They aren't gonna patch it for 15 years, 11 years have already passed.
perlgeek 11mo ago
When I'm writing new software, I kinda hate having to support old legacy stuff, because it makes my life harder, and means I cannot depend on new library or language features. But that's not what happens here, this is probably mostly backporting security fixes to older version. I haven't done that to any meaningful amount, but why wouldn't you find a sense of purpose in it? And if you do, why wouldn't it be fun?
Vinnl 11mo ago
It's extra fun because it's not their own codebase; it's a bunch of upstreams that never planned to support it for that long. If they're lucky, some of them will even receive the bug reports and complaints directly...
xandrius 11mo ago
For the right price, I wouldn't mind.
dehugger 11mo ago
why would old code be worth less? to me its a great achievement for a codebase to maintain stability and usability over a long timespan. if you venture even five feet into the world of enterprise software (particularly at non tech companies) you will discover that fifteen years isnt a very long time. when you spend many millions on a core system that is critical to your business you want it to continue working for many, many years.

SoftTalker 11mo ago

Some people just want a job, they don’t wrap up their sense of self worth in it.

lukan 11mo ago
Nothing to do with self worth, it is a meaningful job, but a fun one?
- cyber_kinetist 11mo ago
  Not all jobs are fun, but they can be bearable if meaningful enough (whether that being useful for other people, or even just provide a living wage to support your family)
- wjnc 11mo ago
  Clear mission, a well set up team and autonomy in execution can make most jobs fun to do? Stress (due to), lack of autonomy, lack of clear mission and bad teams and management I think are the root of unhappy work?

pram 11mo ago

On the other hand: dealing with 14.04 is practically cutting edge compared to stuff still using AIX and HPUX, which were outdated even 20 years ago lol

wkat4242 11mo ago
It's because they stopped development in the late 90s. Before Windows 95 (Chicago) came out, HP-UX with VUE was really cutting edge. IBM kinda screwed it up when they created CDE out of it though. And besides the GUI, all unixes were way more cutting edge than anything windows except NT. Only when that went mainstream with XP it became serious. I know your 20 year timeframe is after XP's release, but I just wanted to point out there was a time when the unixes were way ahead. You could even get common software like WP, Lotus 123 and even internet explorer and the consumer outlook (i forget the name) for them in the late 90s.
- muterad_murilax 11mo ago
  > IBM kinda screwed it up when they created CDE out of it though. Could you please elaborate?
  - wkat4242 11mo ago
    VUE was really "happy", clean. Sans-serif fonts. Cool colours. Funny design like a HP logo and on/off button on the dock. IBM made it super suit and tie. Geriatric colour schemes with dark colours, formal serif fonts and anything cool removed. Functionally it was the same (even two or three features were added) but it went from "designed for people" to "designed for business". Like everything that IBM got their hands on in those days (these days they make nothing of consequence anymore anyway, they're just a consulting firm). It was really disappointing to me when we got the "upgrade". And HP was really dismissive of VUE because they wanted to protect their collaboration deal. I think 10.30 was peak HP-UX. 11 and 11i were the decline.
egorfine 11mo ago
Well I look at it from the relativistic perspective. See, AIX or HPUX are frozen in time and there is no temptation whatsoever within those two environments. Being stuck in Ubuntu 14.04 you can actually take a look out the window and see what you are missing by being stuck in the past. It hurts.
pjmlp 11mo ago
Aix is still getting new releases, don't mix it up with HP-UX.

kijin 11mo ago

> Unless they found someone who really likes doing this kind of thing? There are more people like that than one might think. There's a sizable community of people who still play old video games. There are people who meticulously maintain 100 year old cars, restore 500 year old works of art, and find their passion in exploring 1000 year old buildings. The HN front page still gets regular posts lamenting loss of the internet culture of the 80s and 90s, trying to bring back what they perceive as lost. I'm sure there are a number of bearded dudes who would commit themselves to keeping an old distro alive, just for the sake of not having to deal with systemd for example.

bpye 11mo ago
> There's a sizable community of people who still play old video games. I went to the effort of reverse engineering part of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 to add a resizeable windowed mode and fix it's behaviour with high poll rate mice... It can definitely be interesting to make old games behave on newer platforms.
- bfkwlfkjf 11mo ago
  Search YouTube for "gog noclip documentary", without quotes. Right up your alley.
throwaway7356 11mo ago
> I'm sure there are a number of bearded dudes who would commit themselves to keeping an old distro alive, just for the sake of not having to deal with systemd for example. I don't think so: there are Debian forks that aspire to fight against the horrors of GNOME, systemd, Wayland and Rust, but they don't attract people to work on them.
- bradfa 11mo ago
  That there are so many indicates to me the opposite. There are lots of people who want to work on that kind of thing, just they all have slightly different opinions as to which part is the part they’re fighting against, hence so many different forks. The forks are all volunteer projects (except Ubuntu), so having slightly different opinions isn’t considering capitalism as a driving force.

al_borland 11mo ago

Most people I know don’t like chasing the latest framework that everyone will forget about in 6 months.

asteroidburger 11mo ago

You're not adding new features and such like that. Just patching security vulnerabilities in a forked branch. Sure, you won't get the niceties of modern developments, but at least you have access to all of the source code and a working development environment.

worthless-trash 11mo ago
As someone who actively maintains old rhel, the development environment is something you can drag forward. The biggest problem is fixing security flaws with patches that dont have 'simple' fixes. I imagine that they are going to have problems with accurately determining vulnerability in older code bases where code is similar, but not the same.
- littlestymaar 11mo ago
  > I imagine that they are going to have problems with accurately determining vulnerability in older code bases where code is similar, but not the same. That sounds like a fun job actually.
  - fweimer 11mo ago
    If you can find the patches, it's fun to tweak them in the most conservative way possible to apply to the old code base. However, things get annoying once something ends up on some priority list (like the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list from CISA), you ship the software in a much older version, and there is no reproducer and no isolated patch. What do you do then? Rebase to get the alleged fix? You can't even tell if the vulnerability was present in the previous version.
    - worthless-trash 11mo ago
      This guy backports.
    - littlestymaar 11mo ago
      > However, things get annoying once something ends up on some priority list (like the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list from CISA), you ship the software in a much older version, and there is no reproducer There are known exploited vulnerabilities without PoC? TIL and that doesn't sound fun at all indeed.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 11mo ago

Maybe I'm the odd one out but I love doing stuff that has long term stability written all over it. In fact the IT world moving as fast as it does is one of my major frustrations. Professionally I have to keep up so I'm reading myself absolutely silly but it is getting to the point where I expect that one of these days I'll end up being surprised because a now 'well known technique' was completely unknown to me.

bionsystem 11mo ago
I agree. We are going as far as being asked to release our public app on self-hosted kube cluster in 9 months, with no kube experience and nobody with a CKA in a 2.5 person ops team. "Just do it it's easy" is the name of the game now, if you fail you're bad, if you offer stability and respect delivery dates you are out-fashioned, and the discussion comes back every week and every warning and concern is ignored. I remember a long time ago one of our client was a bank, they had 2 datacenters with a LACP router, SPARC machines, Solaris, VxFS, Sybase, Java app. They survived 20 years with app, OS and hardware upgrades and 0 second of downtime. And I get lectured by a 3 years old developer that I should know better.
- nubinetwork 11mo ago
  > "just do it, its easy" If its that easy, then why aren't they doing it instead of you? Yeah, I thought so.
  - le-mark 11mo ago
    > "just do it, its easy" This is where devops came from. Developers saw admins and said I can do that in code! Every time egotistical, eager to please developers say something is easy, business says ok, do it. This is also where agile (developers doing project management) comes from.
lucideer 11mo ago
> I love doing stuff that has long term stability written all over it I also love doing stuff that has long term stability written all over it. In my 20 year career of trying to do that through various roles, I've learnt that it comes with a number of prerequisites: 1. Minimising & controlling your dependencies. Ensuring code you own is stable long term is an entirely different task to ensuring upstream code continues to be available & functional. Pinning only goes sofar when it comes to CVEs. 2. Start from scratch. The effort to bring an inherited codebase that was explicitly not written with longevity in mind into line with your own standards may seem like a fun challenge, but it becomes less fun at a certain scale. 3. Scale. If you're doing anything in (1) & (2) to any extent, keep it small. Absolutely none of the above is remotely applicable to a project like Ubuntu.

ahartmetz 11mo ago

IME (do note, the things I've dealt with were obsolete for a much shorter time), such work isn't particularly ugly even though the idea of it is. Some of it will feel like cheating because you just need to paraphrase a fix, some of it will be difficult because critical parts don't exist yet. Maybe you'll get to implement a tiny version of a new feature.

2b3a51 11mo ago

I'm wondering how the maintenance effort would be organised. Would it be existing teams in the main functional areas (networking, file systems, user space tools, kernel, systemd &c) keeping the packages earmarked as 'legacy add-on' as they age out of the usual LTS, old LTS, oldold LTS and so on? Or would it in fact be a special team so people spending most of their working week on the legacy add-on? Does Canonical have teams that map to each release, tracking it down through the stages or do they have functional teams that work on streams of packages that age through?

randomtoast 11mo ago

I guess they are betting that AI can semi-auto patch this distro for 15 years.

kasabali 11mo ago
They aren't gonna patch it for 15 years, 11 years have already passed.

perlgeek 11mo ago

When I'm writing new software, I kinda hate having to support old legacy stuff, because it makes my life harder, and means I cannot depend on new library or language features. But that's not what happens here, this is probably mostly backporting security fixes to older version. I haven't done that to any meaningful amount, but why wouldn't you find a sense of purpose in it? And if you do, why wouldn't it be fun?

Vinnl 11mo ago

It's extra fun because it's not their own codebase; it's a bunch of upstreams that never planned to support it for that long. If they're lucky, some of them will even receive the bug reports and complaints directly...

xandrius 11mo ago

For the right price, I wouldn't mind.

dehugger 11mo ago

why would old code be worth less? to me its a great achievement for a codebase to maintain stability and usability over a long timespan. if you venture even five feet into the world of enterprise software (particularly at non tech companies) you will discover that fifteen years isnt a very long time. when you spend many millions on a core system that is critical to your business you want it to continue working for many, many years.