September 2005
Intermediate to advanced
328 pages
10h 9m
English
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Chapter 10. Maintenance
In the long run every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
—Alan Perlis
“Epigrams in Programming” ACM SIGPLAN, September 1982
This chapter describes how to maintain a development environment and what causes development environments to change. Maintenance of software products is then discussed, along with some typical maintenance tasks and how maintaining a product is affected by each part of a development environment. The final section examines planned removal of things such as files and SCM tags that have been generated while creating products.
Maintaining an Environment
The useful life of the tools that make up a development environment is generally much longer than the life of the products that were created using the environment. No one wants to have to use a different bug tracking tool or a new build tool for every different release of the product. However, environments and their tools do age with time, and as tools are replaced with other tools, the environment gradually changes. The environment that you wrote code in 10 years ago is not the same one that you use now—even Emacs and vi have changed in that time. It’s also probably faster now than it was back then.
What’s important is that older tools and their environment still have to be maintained until all the products that were developed with them are no longer supported. It’s very frustrating to spend time learning about an older version of a product and making changes to the source code, only ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.