Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Same reason people think a project is abandoned if it doesn’t get a „bug fixed and improvement“ update shipped every month.

Good point.

Any new product should have $X bugs/month added by the current developers so that future developers can indicate 'signs of life' by fixing $Y bugs/month![1]

TBH, once a product reaches whatever goal the founders set out to achieve, adding features can only make it worse, not better. Bugfixes, refinements? Sure. Extra features? Can only heighten the learning curve for newcomers in the future, even if the incremental learning curve added is small.

[1] With suitable values for $X and $Y so that a project can show slow and steady improvement in reliability, until the inevitable rewrite 12 months later.

Isn't it easier just to adjust the wording or typos in the comments so that it looks like activity without troubling yourself with actual changes to give the same look?

You could probably just release the same commit again with a different number.

> adding features can only make it worse, not better.

There are exceptions, but software is usually part of a system, a social system. Successful software changes its environment, and in turn, the environment demands change from the software, which diligent maintainers attend to.

It follows that, in the general case, "no change in a long time" is a pretty good indicator that the software is either unsuccessful or abandoned. As I said, there are exceptions (gists might be one of them).

> It follows that, in the general case, "no change in a long time" is a pretty good indicator that the software is either unsuccessful or abandoned.

Or just exceptionally well adapted to a stable social environment. Which might even be so stable precisely because the software is working so well that no changes to either software or social system -- business processes -- are required.

Agreed, as you say it _exceptionally_ well adapted. Where the loop has basically reached a fixed point. As software is a relatively new phenomenon, maybe we'll reach a fixed point for most software in a few hundred years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com