Monday, January 27, 2020

Maintaining Software For A Long Time

On and off for a few weeks, I've been removing a good chunk of legacy support from some software I maintain (FreeIPMI). It's always hard to know exactly how much legacy support is ok to remove and possibly break users, so I decided somewhat randomly "if it's older than 10 years, it's ok to remove it".

It immediately lead to two somewhat orthogonal thoughts:

A slightly negative, "Have I really been maintaining this stuff for 10 years" feeling.  There's the tiny part of me thinking, "Damn, that's a lot of hours spent maintaining this over a long period of time."

A mostly positive, "People are still using my stuff after 10 years" feeling.  The reality is that so much software is not maintained well, so eventually people just stop using it.  So it does make me feel good knowing people still use it.  And everyonce in awhile, I answer a question on Stackoverflow or Serverfault about it, so I know people are definitely still using it.