Re: [OT] Deafening silence

On Tue, 2010-03-16 at 15:24 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
Since you have a "little bit of experience" in development :) do you
think that developers -- maybe mainly application developers? -- would
benefit from this deadline for downstream releases(1)? Debian's "ready
when it's ready" developers wouldn't appreciate much, I'm afraid, but
some agree that they must work towards more (fixed? fixe, in french)
development periods. (I don't care much about you commenting the rest
of my post, but I'd be interested in getting your opinion on this.)

Again it depends. If your application wants to use cool new feature X
then you want everyone to upgrade and then use your cool new app. If you
gain nothing much from upgrades but the hassle of having to rebuild,
retest etc then 'never' is quite a good upgrade rate.

Hummm... I suppose every case is different.

It's a question of benefit and timescales. It doesn't take you 18 months
to certify your desktop works and all the software on top is reliable,
make the entire set up pass a third party security audit, pass the
various credit card requirements, run performance analysis, track down
regressions and then roll out live bit by bit along with any retraining
along the way.

Business timescales are long, and industrial timescales longer still.
There are PDP-11 systems (or these days often emulators!) still running
away in industrial plants doing what they've been doing for thirty odd
years. The machinery they are tied to is often good for fifty plus years
and depreciated accordingly, so there isn't a real urge to upgrade.

The software folks have a very short term perspective - equalled perhaps
by only a few industries such as fashion clothing. Imagine if the first
PC you installed when you joined your first employer would be getting
decomissioned about the time you retired ? Hard to picture but in the
railroad world the chances are the first piece of track laid by some 18
year old newbie platelayer will finally get retired about the same time
as the person who laid it. In civil engineering you often build things
that you expect to last hundreds of years. Todays engineers are doing
'maintenance' (I guess you might consider it 'service pack 2' 8) on
victorian structures that will then be good for just light maintenance
for another century.

This gives people a rather different sense of time and upgrading to
software engineers.

Alan

But the curves depend on the application. If one were to look at the
curve for say the Wright Flyer, to the Blackbird, what would be the
maturation line there? We went from 0 to 3500 knots in just about 55
years. The evolution, from the Kite like stick and cloth to stick and
cloth with frameworks, to sheetmetal and rotary engines to sheetmetal
and metal chassis and jets, and to composite materials and titanium with
scram jets in just 75 years, and no one would think of trying to
retrofit an ejection module from the blackbird to a wright flyer ;-)

Whereas the genesis of the modern general purpose computer has spawned
billions of devices within essentially the same time frame of the
airplane (maybe a bit shorter, but one can never be sure what
governments are hiding.)

And while one might keep a Wright Flyer around, no one would expect it
to do any serious work other than as an educational tool for budding
aerospace engineers. I have programmed on PDP-11's and PDP-8's and also
on microcontrollers that would run rings around them. Modern stuff gets
built because there are uses and needs that the older stuff just cannot
meet. Not that the older stuff has no value, just that its usefulness
is not so wonderful when compared with the new kids on the block. Costs
however can certainly distort this picture.

Regards,
Les H


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