Comment by solyin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solyin | Hacker News Reader

The problem is digital things don't decay in the same way as physical objects. AI can shit out a webpage for an institute that doesn't really exist and make it sound awesome until you realize there's nothing there. A webpage with a vibrant community behind it that is actively maintained looks, at first glance, the same as a page that's been put out to the pasture. A physical store that's out of business will accumulate cruft, broken windows, vines everywhere. There's not really an equivalent for bitrot. Sure, my website from 1996 looks dated because I used frames and we don't do that no more, but eBay and Yahoo and Myspace are still around. Link rot does set in though. Links to pages that no longer exist because the person running it has passed. Archive.org has such a good purpose.

Thing is though, for software, sometimes things can just be done. If a perfectly good piece of software hasn't been updated in years because it hasn't needed to be updated, then let it sit, ensconced in stone. The problem is it's hard to tell the difference between that, and something that needs maintaining but hasn't been.

If the repository has an issue tracker, that helps. Then you can at least see if people are posting issues and whether they are being resolved.

I’ve seen projects that haven’t had a release in years, but the maintainer is still answering questions. I would say that counts as actively maintained, since there’s still someone around to handle bug reports.

> If a perfectly good piece of software hasn't been updated in years because it hasn't needed to be updated

This. When people say "I wouldn't use this because it hasn't been updated for years", maybe it's because it doesn't need updating?

The problem is, how do you know what does not need maintaing? how do you know what's going to bite you in the future? And migrating might be a huge effort. So, the instict becomes to not pick something that is already giving you an negative signal.

I'm not saying that I fully agree with that logic, but I think it's a pretty understandable behaviour.

People can explicitely say it in the readme. At least that's what I'm doing (e.g. https://github.com/oxodao/micromigrations)

well when it comes to github a great window into an non-updated repository is just looking at the github issues. That will signal to you if theres maintenance to be done being ignored or if the software is of quality and maintenance isn't needed yet.

Depends on what it is, for anything that uses a web interface or runs as a native app I'd question many years without updates just because the deployment targets shift so much. Most of the apps I really enjoy on the Mac, for example, at least get yearly updates to whatever new MacOS API changes occurred in the major release.

A video game emulator getting an update every decade though? Some low level tool that's never changed since the beginning of time? Yeah, they're done, what's the problem.

maybe it's because it doesn't need updating

The ground shifts under software. OSs change, dependencies get updates, engines change, compilers are improved occasionally in ways that aren't backwardly compatible. If the maintainer isn't at least checking it's not broken, and updating a changelog to say that it's still working, then you can't safely assume it's fine. "Not updated for years" is shorthand for "It could be broken, but I don't want to be the person who goes through the effort of checking."

If you want people to run your code against a set of pinned dependencies from the last time it was updated then that's one thing, but if you people to run it with an up-to-date set of dependencies on a new OS and on the latest compiler or runtime, then you can't just say it's 'done', because things can change outside of your code that means it won't work any more.

> The problem is digital things don't decay in the same way as physical objects.

I'm not so sure of that. Ask anyone who's ever used VBScript, ActiveX, Flash, <blink>, <marquee>, or (soon) XSLT.

The web likes to portray itself as championing backwards-compatibility, but for better or worse, it is quick to drop technologies perceived as harmful or merely wasteful. If you're unfortunate enough to jump on the wrong bandwagon, you can easily be left behind, and any older pages left untouched can quickly become non-functional.

PHP community would like a word

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