[Themaintainers] [EXTERNAL] Re: XKCD comic on maintenance

[Sims, Benjamin Hayden]

This list always turns up interesting stuff. I’m currently looking at connections between collaboration networks and software dependencies in computing, and both the cartoon and the ImageMagick discussion are very relevant.

Related to Andy’s point, not a lot of modern infrastructures have embraced layers of abstraction as enthusiastically as computing has. The idea behind layers of abstraction is to hide complexity behind simpler interfaces, which makes it possible to think of software as a “stack” of components (and consequently as a Jenga-like construct as depicted in the cartoon). So part of me wants to say that weird dependencies might be better hidden, and hence more surprising, in software. But on the other hand there are plenty of examples of hidden dependencies in old-school infrastructure. I’m not sure they follow the same stack-like structure though, so the cartoon might look a little different. I’m curious if any of the software developers/maintainers on the list have some perspective on this.

Ben

Benjamin Sims
Los Alamos National Laboratory
https://public.lanl.gov/bsims/


From: <themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu> on behalf of Andrew Russell <andy at themaintainers.org>
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 10:24 AM
To: themaintainers <themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Themaintainers] XKCD comic on maintenance

Thank you Kara & James for sharing!  It’s always educational to see what the folks on hacker news think about things :)

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.

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?

Andy

On Aug 18, 2020, at 11:13 AM, James Howison <jhowison at ischool.utexas.edu<mailto:jhowison at ischool.utexas.edu>> wrote:

Love it!  I always learn something from people discussing these online, like on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24193278  (long discussion of ImageMagick in there)

And the explainxkcd wiki): https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency

James Howison

Associate Professor
School of Information
University of Texas at Austin
http://james.howison.name<http://james.howison.name/>


On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 9:13 AM Kara Andersen <karalynn.andersen at gmail.com<mailto:karalynn.andersen at gmail.com>> wrote:
Hello Maintainers -

In case you haven’t seen it already, I thought I’d share this XKCD comic about maintenance.

Kara

<dependency_2x.png>

Permalink: https://xkcd.com/2347/
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