29 Maintenance Quotes

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage.

Everybody thinks that Disneyland is a gold mine - but we have had our problems. You've got to work it and know how to handle it. Even trying to keep the park clean is a tremendous expense. And those sharp-pencil guys tell you, 'Walt, if we cut down on maintenance, we'd save a lot of money.' But I don't believe in that - it's like any other show on the road; it must be kept clean and fresh.

Three things alone are certain when you venture into a loft: that you will crack your head on a beam at least twice, that you will get cobwebs draped over your face, and that you will not find what you went looking for.

There are still some other things to do, so don't think if I didn't fix your favorite bug that your bug report is in the bit bucket. (It may be, but don't think it. :-)

If you remove stricture from a large Perl program currently, you're just installing delayed bugs, whereas with this feature, you're installing an instant bug that's easily fixed. Whoopee.

I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI.pm, we're probably okay.

That is a known bug in 5.00550. Either an upgrade or a downgrade will fix it.

Your csh still thinks true is false. Write to your vendor today and tell them that next year Configure ought to 'rm /bin/csh' unless they fix their blasted shell. :-)

Hmm, doubtful. The source code generally wasn't there when I needed it.

You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now.

#define NULL 0 /* silly thing is, we don't even use this */

tmps_base = tmps_max; /* protect our mortal string */

if (instr(buf,sys_errlist[errno])) /* you don't see this */

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn't think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.

I reboot [my Windows PC] every night.

The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future.

Rise up, Sir Peter Wolf's-Bane. And, whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword. (ch. 12)