Comment by morshu9001

Comment by morshu9001 11 hours ago

2 replies

The update tech debt tends not to compound or even accumulate at all. Usually you'd pay the same to update v1 to v2 as you would for v1 to v3. Maybe skipping v2 has a negative cost even.

cesarb 4 hours ago

> Maybe skipping v2 has a negative cost even.

I've seen this plenty of times: v1 of some library has one way of doing things, v2 of that library changes to a new incompatible way, and then v2.1 introduces a few extra changes to make it easier to port from the v1 way. If you wait a while, you have to do less work to update than if you had updated immediately.

One example is Python 3. After the first few Python 3.x releases, a few "useless" features were introduced to make it easier to port code from Python 2.7 (IIRC, things like reintroducing the u'...' syntax for unicode strings, which had been removed by Python 3.0 since normal '...' strings are now always unicode strings).

  • morshu9001 3 hours ago

    Optionals in protobuf 2 vs 3 is another one. The feature wasn't even useless, it's just that v3 was really opinionated against them and later conceded.