Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  Auto Updates without user interaction is the biggest
  security benefit I can think of for a normal user.

Auto updates are a great security benefit, yes.

So it's a shame so many companies shit all over auto updates by rolling out poorly tested changes that introduce new problems, and similar behaviour that motivates users to disable auto updates.

View on HN

Microsoft also shits all over auto-updates by grinding underpowered computers to a halt and making powerful computers sound like hair driers while their auto-update runs ngen, grinds out msi executions, consumes disk space that isn't later cleaned up regardless of how much space is available, and generally acts like an ill-behaved uninvited guest.

Agreed. You should be able to get automated security updates and optional feature updates.

Which would mean exponentially growing testing requirements on the part of the company delivering the updates.

"Should" in an ideal world doesn't equal "should" in a world with deadlines and limited resources. It's enough work to ensure that all the features work with ONE version of an app. If you had to also test every version of the app without this or that feature update installed, you just continually multiply the testing requirements by the number of optional features.

And don't say unit testing solves this problem. The problem is in INTEGRATION testing with the whole app, which 99% of the time can only adequately be done by making the build and having a human use it. Even automated integration tools won't find things like formatting errors and buttons too small for humans to click.

I'd like to continue to maintain ONE app, please, and not `n!` app permutations.

Your premise seems to ignore that maintaining several versions, even with numerous highly dependent variations, is something that was the norm in the software industry until relatively recently. Microsoft famously managed it with Windows for a long time until they lost the plot. I've run Debian systems for many years and never had unattended-updates break a box.

The trouble with today's highly connected world is that it has bred a culture of shipping software that isn't really production quality, on the basis that it can be fixed (or not) later and that's sufficient. This leads to arguments like your final paragraph: you (the developer) would obviously prefer to only maintain the latest and greatest of what you do, but stated without taking into account the consequences of that policy for your users/customers.

While I have a lot of sympathy for your desire, as a developer myself, I think you can only justify that sort of position if your previous releases are sufficiently good that they don't need maintenance. Otherwise, if you have customers paying for one thing, and that thing is defective, and you then want to use those defects as leverage to push your customers to something that is not what they paid for, then I think you're on very shaky ground. There are a lot of ethical, economic and legal issues raised by that sort of business strategy.

To be fair, Microsoft is still doing it (maintaining several revisions through security and bug fixes) with Windows 10 and Server 2016 and priors, it's just not visible to customers outside enterprise. The change is the expectation for your typical consumer or small business user, who are now used to everything updating and obsolescing periodically.

I don't like this attitude either, though. Developers have gotten fat and lazy not dealing with any sort of variation in deployment, let alone versions. Everything is all Android or iOS. All Chrome and maybe Firefox. x86 or ... maybe arm. And not be connected to the Internet? That's unpossible!

With hindsight and better tooling we should be able to handle more complexity in how products are used, not less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com