On Tue, 2022-12-06 at 19:30 -0500, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
The keyword is "known". Developers don't work on 5 or
10 year old
software. Existing bugs don't get uncovered and fixed. They don't
become "known", so they don't get backported and fixed.
That's exactly the point Greg HK makes at
https://thenewstack.io/design-system-can-update-greg-kroah-hartman-linux-...
. No one is working on old kernels. Problems in old kernels are going
to remain latent and unfixed. Kernel developers and Red Hat may
backport an occasional fix, but they are not fixing all the problems.
Odd. On my CentOS 7 system, my last kernel update was mid-November,
the prior the month before, another a month before that, another a
month before that. Hardly not being worked on. The kernel is an on-
going thing, and various distros backport what they can.
And we do have applications with long history, LibreOffice being just
one that springs to mind. Though some people might argue some projects
never fix bugs, as many bug reports go back many years with no
resolutions, it's full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.
The same thing happens in userland. I help maintain several
projects,
and contribute to many others. None of those projects concern
themselves with 5 or 10 year old software. The problems in old
software remain unfixed.
My experience with programmers is that they don't like having the rug
pulled out from under them mid-development. There are many programs
that spend years in development (pre- and post-release). That's harder
to do when you have to keep re-learning the quirks of systems.
Likewise with sysadmins. Many features upgrades are entirely unwanted,
bug fixes is all they're interested in.
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