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The reality of long-term software maintenance from the maintainer's perspective
I was reading about a dispute involving the Linux kernel recently (which for the record I don't think either side handled well), and I realised something: Very...
I was reading about a dispute involving the Linux kernel recently (which for the record I don't think either side handled well), and I realised something: very few people seem to understand the reality of maintaining large software projects in the long term. The reality is, if you maintain a large and complex software project over a period of many years, you come to realise a key point: writing the initial code for a feature is only a fraction of the work, once you take in to account everything else you also have to do in the long term. This then creates a thorny diplomatic problem when people propose things like substantial prototypes, patches, or libraries - the software world's equivalent to our analogy of building an extension.
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