[Themaintainers] XKCD comic on maintenance

[Casey Boardman]

"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.?

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.)

-Casey



On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 12:24 PM Andrew Russell <andy at themaintainers.org>
wrote:

> 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>
> 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
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 9:13 AM Kara Andersen <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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