[Themaintainers] XKCD comic on maintenance

[Jaime Taylor]

I’ve seen it remixed for libraries, where it says, “All modern library cataloging infrastructure” and “MARCEdit Terry Reese has been thanklessly maintaining since 1999.”

See: https://twitter.com/scottythered/status/1295497075417726976/photo/1


Jaime Taylor
Discovery & Resource Management Systems Coordinator
W.E.B. Du Bois Library
University of Massachusetts
154 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01003
jaimetaylor at umass.edu<mailto:jaimetaylor at umass.edu>
413-577-3401

Proud member of the Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP/MTA/NEA), the union representing faculty and librarians at UMass Amherst, and supporting public education and labor movements everywhere: umassmsp.org<http://umassmsp.org/>

From: themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu <themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu> On Behalf Of Casey Boardman
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2020 8:07 AM
To: Andrew Russell <andy at themaintainers.org>
Cc: themaintainers <themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu>
Subject: Re: [Themaintainers] XKCD comic on maintenance

"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<mailto: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<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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