Absolutely, many updates are security fixes.
And usually, because of security fixes in third party code libraries. Most code editors and/or linters will report that there is a vulnerability in X library and it should be updated to X.1.
For sure. I was short-handing the user’s perspective. I’m a product manager for a development organization… definitely get that it’s not literally the developers who are making the call here.
(Hijack) Also, while I admit my experience is limited (I have worked for two employers in this career: a small < 100 person software company, and a 10,000+ multi national), I think that a robust and resourced QA process is less standard than is often described.
Yeah, I don’t get the “encourages it” bit. In my experience the linter makes for more strict enforcement of best practices than any amount of human review or “desk work”. It will definitely see things that humans will not notice consistently.
Our process does include human review of each CL, but that is more for higher-level concerns. Like “Is this code easily readable?”, “Does it meet the need it is being written for?” , “Does it have appropriate unit tests?” (and even that is helped by coverage analysis). But no one thinks that even the most diligent human review is going to outclass clang-tidy.
That sounds like a product management problem. When people start wanting to talk to the developers, it’s usually because they find the usual bug/feature prioritization process too onerous and bureaucratic and their requests are getting passed through layers of management in a big game of telephone before anyone can act on them even sees them.
And a company that advertises that you can talk directly to the developers is pretty much advertising that their product management process is bureaucratic, which is not a good look.
But this all happens before the CI pipeline even starts. CI helps get what you decide to make into production efficiently. It’s no guarantee that you decided to make the right thing.
No one enforced desk checking - it was over by the time I got my first job. You enforced it on yourself after the first time a stupid syntax error made you have to wait an hour to get your next run through.
Lint didn’t exist back then. Obviously all releases should go through a full testing process. That takes time.
I remember reading about a Japanese watchmaker who had so many products that each version got a 12 hour window to go to manufacturing. (Clearly, these were small variations on a product.) Miss your window and your product is canceled. I suspect it would concentrate the mind wonderfully.
This was an offer by them. I certainly didn’t request it. And developers not seeing every feature request is a feature. Concentration is important - a developer torn away from working on something to work on something else is going to result in bad code since they forget what they were doing when they return to it. If you’ve ever been involved in doing demos or running a booth at a trade show you’ll know that 80% of customer requests are not going to be done. It could be because the request is stupid, or because it would require a lot more work than the customer can imagine. The trick is saying “great idea, we’ll consider it” with a straight face.
Our customer base wasn’t very big. It would be a lot worse if you were dealing with thousands upon thousands of requests.
True. OTOH, when you have a short customer list, they know it. And they expect to get semi-custom software for an off-the-shelf price.
Somebody like e.g. MS Office knows they have millions (billions?) of customers. From their POV, feature requests are a form of voting, not demanding. They have the advantage of knowing which requests are popular, and which are not. From your POV, you know your desires for [whatever feature] are but a drop in their bucket.
One thing I could see that might make people happier is having a setting for how frequently you check for updates. Another would be some sort of “update preview” that would let you see what gets updates.
Personally, I don’t find the frequency of updates to be a problem. It’s just that there’s no distinction between big and small updates. That’s what gets me to turn them off. Ideally, small updates that don’t affect functionality or fix bugs would happen automatically, but I would be asked about a bigger change.
For example, I turned off automatic updates for Firefox ever since they replaced the app with a new one that wasn’t yet at feature parity. I turned off automatic updates of the Clock app because they switched it to where you just press a button to turn off the alarm, rather than the more sensible “slide” that made sure you were awake. I also shut it off for plenty more apps that are not significant security risks, nor need additional data.
Firefox is the one that is a security risk to some degree, but I do keep up with updates to some degree. I just make sure there’s no big breaking change like before.
Clock really sucks as resinstalling means I’d lose all my alarms, and I use a lot of them. (I have a medicine I have to take at a different time every day.)
And I’m rambling now, so I’ll shut up.
I’m sorta the opposite.
I accept that I’m simply surfing the leading edge of whatever my app vendors choose their apps to be. I did not research them in detail before installing them, and I sure don’t have any influence over how they evolve over time.
So I simply run the OS & store update apps every week-ish, and adapt to the consequences whatever they may be. I understand that I don’t own/control my whole hardware / software stack and haven’t since about 1995. Stuff gonna change, and I’m gonna deal with it.
The alternative view, and the one that I subscribe to, is that there’s a lot you can do with little effort to prevent or mitigate the effects of unwanted changes being forced on you. I find it makes life simpler and more pleasant. I’m all for life being more pleasant.
Yep, that’s always been my approach, whether it’s been PCs, phones, cable boxes, smart TVs, or anything else technological.
Anything else is essentially being an old man bitching about inevitable change. And I don’t really want to be that guy, nor do I want to foster that sort of inflexibility in myself either. I tend to enjoy the change and interesting new stuff, rather than get grumpy that it changed and isn’t exactly how I liked it, because you know, sometimes it’s actually better than it was.
I feel like if you aren’t open to change, you’re going to be that old fart bitching about how modern phones don’t have that stupid-ass Blackberry wheel anymore.
Ultimately, you can change slowly and gradually or you can keep using your e.g. XP desktop look until it finally can’t be used under Windows 12 after the 3rd party outfit you’d gotten it from went out of business 12 years ago. Then you have to jump directly from XP look and feel and features and folder layout and … to all native Windows 12 stuff in one big bite.
I know which of those two I find more traumatic. YMMV of course.
There are lots of smart decisions we each made configuring our first DOS computer to our liking. And our first Windows 3.1 PC or porthole Mac. Sticking to those decisions now isn’t conservative or low-effort. It’s actively stupid and making one’s life actively harder.
So the question becomes one of degree more than of kind. You will change your decisions and configurations and … I’ts just a matter of how, when, and in how big of a jump?
What’s a “stupid-ass Blackberry wheel”? Is that what they’re calling a dial nowadays?
And the path for computation is surely that more and more of the processing (not just data storage) will be in the cloud - the way Alexa works now. At which point there is no local copy of the software that you can fossilize.
I don’t know what it was called twenty years ago; all I know is that I hated my Blackberry for multiple reasons, and that wheel-thing on the side was one.
Is there any such thing as an updating app that posts a message when you’re starting to log off or shut down, like “There are updates to XYZ available, would you like to approve them? Your log off/shut down will proceed after the updates are completed.”?
Nothing says convenience like logging on and getting the message “XYZ updates are available for your computer. Would you like to postpone whatever task you were hoping to accomplish so that the updates can be installed along with a mandatory restart when they’re completed?”.
Laptop users would be infuriated by apps that wanted to update when they were trying to close the laptop, unplug, and move on to their next event.
For most app for phones & tablets, the old version still works, so the app update is usually not “must do now.” Unless you get way far behind on them.
OS updates are a rather different matter.