<div dir="ltr">"Criminal" or "grandfathered in" or simply "not broken (yet)"? :) Maybe replace "A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining" with "a wire some rodent has been chewing on" or "a pipe that's been in the ground for decades", etc.?<div><br></div><div>Making this comic more generic is a good exercise in "what could go wrong?". The stuff that rarely changes and even more rarely breaks can be (and often is) taken for granted in both the digital and physical worlds. As usual, XKCD nails it. (And if you need a picture to try to justify time/money for a maintenance project, I can't think of a better one.)</div><div><br></div><div>-Casey</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 12:24 PM Andrew Russell <<a href="mailto:andy@themaintainers.org" target="_blank">andy@themaintainers.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space">Thank you Kara & James for sharing! It’s always educational to see what the folks on hacker news think about things :)<div><br></div><div>I’ve been mulling how the cartoon would look if we took out the word “digital” so that it’s captioned “All Modern Infrastructure.” The dependency nicely depicted by XKCD might be apt for the unregulated, unlicensed world of software. </div><div><br></div><div>But for electricians or construction workers, who have to comply with all kinds of industry codes and state/federal regulations, this approach to dependencies might be… [trying to think of the right word]… criminal?<br><div><br></div><div>Andy</div><div><br><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Aug 18, 2020, at 11:13 AM, James Howison <<a href="mailto:jhowison@ischool.utexas.edu" target="_blank">jhowison@ischool.utexas.edu</a>> wrote:</div><br><div><div dir="ltr">Love it! I always learn something from people discussing these online, like on HackerNews: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24193278" target="_blank">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24193278</a> (long discussion of ImageMagick in there)<div><br></div><div>And the explainxkcd wiki): <a href="https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency" target="_blank">https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency</a></div><div><br clear="all"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">James Howison<div><br><div>Associate Professor</div><div>School of Information</div><div>University of Texas at Austin</div><div><a href="http://james.howison.name/" target="_blank">http://james.howison.name</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 9:13 AM Kara Andersen <<a href="mailto:karalynn.andersen@gmail.com" target="_blank">karalynn.andersen@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div><div>Hello Maintainers -</div><div><br></div><div>In case you haven’t seen it already, I thought I’d share this XKCD comic about maintenance.</div><div><br></div><div>Kara</div><div><br></div><div><span id="gmail-m_-5760811394070105571gmail-m_121886617340324122gmail-m_-7046535625780297372cid:174021f9d8c8e39de351"><dependency_2x.png></span></div><div><br></div>Permalink: <a href="https://xkcd.com/2347/" target="_blank">https://xkcd.com/2347/</a></div>_______________________________________________<br>
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