Comment by noirscape
5 hours ago
There's a difference between software that's "done" (it never needs updates, ever) and software that's done (it only needs maintenance for security and platform churn).
The former is extremely rare; platform churn alone will usually demand updates, even if your code is otherwise airtight. Forces generally beyond your access will demand that your code is able to conform to platform standards. The demand this places can be very variable and depends more on the platform than you. (Windows has low platform churn since it's possible to futz with compat features, Linux is extremely variable on your codebase, MacOS is fairly constant and from what I know about mobile phones, you're basically signing up to forever maintenance duty).
The latter is much more common; sure, sudo still gets updates but most of those won't be new features. Specification wise, sudo is "done". It does what it needs to, it's interface is defined and there aren't going to be any strange surprises when I run sudo between any system made in the past 10 years or so.
The problem is that when you're selling software, demanding compensation for the former is a hard sell since it's things customers won't see or necessarily care about. Demanding compensation for the latter is much more obviously acceptable.
I’m not sure truly ‘done’ exists on systems that interact with other systems unless it’s an entirely closed loop.
I reckon closed-loop systems can be ‘done’ every bit as much as hardware systems can be if the design, debugging and implementation are disciplined enough.
> MacOS is fairly constant
Except when they killed all 32bit games a few years ago with Catalina.
I think that GP meant that MacOS has a constant nonzero rate of platform churn. I might be wrong though!
Oops, yes, I meant a constant non-zero rate. It's slightly above mobile phones, where the developer is treated as the problem that needs to fix itself.
Stuff written for one version of MacOS will probably work for the next few versions, but there's just as likely a chance that Apple has decided that you need to do a full on update of all your older tools. Things like dropping Rosetta, 32-bit from the kernel and so on and so forth. There's not really any recourse, unlike Windows and Linux where you can usually finagle a workable solution without having to resort to updating everything all the time (so platform churn exists, but a user can theoretically choose to avoid it).
This is unlike phones, where there's basically no real expectations for when you need to update stuff, so it becomes a case of "you need to test every version". The lack of respect for tool stability is just one other reason why the mobile ecosystem is the user-hostile hell it is; this platform churn pretty much is one of the two roots of why mobile apps are Like That. (The other being that running your own choice of tools is treated as a privilege, not a right.)