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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

That depends on your tech stack. I have Perl CGI and Java apps that have been running unchanged for two decades. And the only thing I ever had to change on Debian over that time was adding HTTPS (Let's Encrypt) and SPF/DMARC for email.

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Yeah, but my point is that you have to upgrade your OS. If you never change anything, obviously you don't need to worry.

My point is that OS upgrades don’t have to break tech stacks, and don’t tend to with runtimes that care a lot about backwards compatibility like Perl and Java. I did regularly upgrade Debian across those two decades.

IMO that quality should be the default, and I would choose my OS and tech stacks accordingly.

Don't they link against static libraries? How do they do that?

The runtimes are part of the Linux distribution and get upgraded along with it (and receive continuous security updates along with it), while maintaining backwards compatibility for the application code (Perl scripts or Java bytecode). Tools like needrestart will notify when a process needs to be restarted to take advantage of the update.

Ah, all your dependencies are in the language you're using? Some of mine use dependencies that are written in compiled languages.

Not necessarily, but they are part of the Linux distribution.

Well, I don't know about you, but my dependencies have often been built against a static library from a different version of the OS, so they wouldn't work on mine.

OS updates are important sometimes. Security and all...

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