| ▲ | cogman10 4 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||
Yup. OpenJDK is one of the best success stories of this. Up until Java 9, they would release once features were complete. But that meant there were years between the 7 and 8 release and even more years between the 8 and 9 release. The industry had gotten into the habit of always running old versions of Java (my company was on 6 for an uncomfortable amount of time. But others have had it worse). More frequent smaller releases has gotten companies more into the habit of updating frequently which also, very helpfully, gives devs new features frequently. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | kjs3 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Sorry to derail...but that brought up some bad memories. The networking company Wellfleet (became Bay Networks thru merger with Synoptics, then died as a chunk of Nortel Networks) had a management tool called 'Site Manager' (SM, aka 'Site Mangler' aka 'S&M'). SM was a monstrous Java app that papered over the (horrifying) fact that everything on a Wellfleet router was configured with SNMP (full-body shiver). Oh, there was a CLI, but even a hard-core CLI pilot like myself couldn't face stuff like "set wflplnterfaceEntry.2.192.168.10.10.3 1" all day long. Wellfleet clearly employed no software engineers, only monkeys that hammered on keyboards and piled cruft upon cruft to the SM codebase. The end result was that every release of Wellfleet device code (down to point releases) relied on a particular version of SM, which, of course, relied on a particular version of Java. Now, since virtually no site over a certain size could count on every device running the same version of code, you had to be able to switch between a couple of versions of Java to run a given version of SM. And, as a consultant to Wellfleet shops, I had to be able to run all of them. I got really good at multibooting Windows, but in the end I had a 'Wellfleet' laptop modified a bit so I could easily pop it open and swap disks, each one for a different version of SM running on a different version of Java. Good times...it was not. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jabl 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
The Linux kernel is another example. The 2.5 development cycle (which led to the stable 2.6 series) was brutally long, and distros resorted to back-porting new features into their own kernels based on the stable 2.4 series that they provided to their users, creating all kinds of excitement. After 2.6.0 was released, Linus basically went nope, not gonna do that again. | |||||||||||||||||
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