On Wed, 25 Oct 2023 09:01:18 +0000 Michael Kjörling <2695bd53d...@ewoof.net> wrote:
> > I see lots of people in this sub-thread arguing for cobbled-together, > "it works for me for now and if it breaks I'll just fix it later" > style solutions. > > Not arguing about anything else, but this situation you describe is how IT works, and will continue to work until it stabilises, maybe a century from now. I have web pages on my home intranet written anything up to twenty years ago. The versions of HTML, PHP, Perl etc that I used in many of them are long obsolete. To do things right, I ought to go over that code line by line every year or two, checking current documentation to see what's deprecated, find out how to workaround it and fix it. Life's too short. So when I use a page I haven't used for years, there's a good chance it won't work, and I'll have to fix it then. So be it. Scale that up, and it's how the whole of IT works. Inevitably, things will break, hardware and software won't work on new operating systems, and so on. We have to live with it. Yes, it's nice to do things exactly correctly, but they are only exactly correct today. Tomorrow, they may be deprecated, and eventually removed. The exact situation you address may be set in stone for all time. Or it may not: it can be changed on a whim. All we can do is make the best choice at the time, and even then we have to guess at how much time we need to spend researching it in order to have a better choice than we can see now, and whether it's worth doing that when we don't even know that there is a better choice possible. -- Joe
