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Lennart: The State & Future Of Systemd

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  • Originally posted by profoundWHALE View Post
    Here's the point with software engineering, 10 years down the road it can be doing the same thing it originally did. Sure it won't take advantage of newer hardware and extensions only make it go so far, but it's not going to randomly break on its own. There might be a compatibility issue, but that is true in the real world too; car parts that aren't interchangeable. The difference is with software you can have all the advantages!
    It seems you're not a distribution packager. A lot of software eventually shows its age without maintenance. You'll need to fix security bugs, deal with API changes of libraries you rely upon, etc. 10 years is a very long time to go without any maintenance. If you follow a distribution development mailing list you'll regularly see that various software _is_ removed.

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    • Originally posted by profoundWHALE View Post
      Here's the point with software engineering, 10 years down the road it can be doing the same thing it originally did. Sure it won't take advantage of newer hardware and extensions only make it go so far, but it's not going to randomly break on its own. There might be a compatibility issue, but that is true in the real world too; car parts that aren't interchangeable. The difference is with software you can have all the advantages!
      The thing is, software doesn't exist independently. You cannot design your software with making it last forever in mind, because what you end up with is "legacy software" (if it's important) or "removed/unused" (if it's not).
      Software needs both active maintenance and regular evolution paths. Probably even more than the "real world", because most of the maintenance must be done by engineers too.

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      • Maybe this is the moment when some Linux advocates notice that there's a world outside their plates...

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        • Originally posted by erendorn View Post
          The thing is, software doesn't exist independently. You cannot design your software with making it last forever in mind, because what you end up with is "legacy software" (if it's important) or "removed/unused" (if it's not).
          Software needs both active maintenance and regular evolution paths. Probably even more than the "real world", because most of the maintenance must be done by engineers too.
          Uh, cars, buildings, roads, and more all need maintenance. Developers have to patch security holes just like construction workers who have to patch roads and such that aren't safe.

          Legacy is usually neglected or outdated, but it never wears and tears by itself. That's the point.

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          • IceWM is a legavy desktop and it works fine

            Originally posted by erendorn View Post
            The thing is, software doesn't exist independently. You cannot design your software with making it last forever in mind, because what you end up with is "legacy software" (if it's important) or "removed/unused" (if it's not).
            Software needs both active maintenance and regular evolution paths. Probably even more than the "real world", because most of the maintenance must be done by engineers too.
            I use IceWM on my smallest machine (the netbook) for performance reason. There are some minor bugs concerning the system tray but they have workarounds. I use it with its own panel and with Caja, plus starting things like nm-applet, volti, and cinnamon-settings-daemon in the startup file. I can fire up pulseaudio manually if I need to use it for a mono sound file or to capture streaming sound. All this on a desktop that has had little upstream attention in many years, possibly a decade. It was considered old when one of the early netbook users chose it for their LInux based DE, for the exact same reason I did: performance on low resource machines.

            Not all legacy software is garbage or incompatable! That netbook uses systemd for startup and has no trouble at all going into a DE that predates systemd by a decade.

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            • Originally posted by Luke View Post
              Not all legacy software is garbage or incompatable! That netbook uses systemd for startup and has no trouble at all going into a DE that predates systemd by a decade.
              Well, to be fair, IceWM is also still maintained (although apparently not actively developed), with commits to their primary source repository as recently as November of last year.

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              • Originally posted by profoundWHALE View Post
                Uh, cars, buildings, roads, and more all need maintenance. Developers have to patch security holes just like construction workers who have to patch roads and such that aren't safe.

                Legacy is usually neglected or outdated, but it never wears and tears by itself. That's the point.
                You misread. "Even more" certainly does not suggest that cars, building and roads don't need maintenance
                But as you wrote it yourself, maintenance on roads and cars are done by workers, not by architects or car designers/engineers, while software is maintained by developers. Read again the sentence you emphasized and misunderstood.

                In any case legacy wears out by gradually becoming unfit for purpose (and many other causes). It doesn't matter if original code is still up to original specs. You'll have to change it or replace it at some point. The end results is the same, so claiming that it is lexically distinct is completely pointless.

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