Why upgrade when it’s not needed?

Because we like it.

Programmers love to be “in the edge”. I love to do that; on my gentoo system I’m constantly doing emerge -u world, and in ubuntu I’m always clicking the little orange icon. Now i’m fine with it if it affects me… but we live in a bigger world.

I remember one of the mottos of servers administration is “DO NOT UPGRADE”. Why? Simple. you don’t need it because what’s there now it’s working; and this is why you see production systems running OS versions from 2-3 or more years ago, and eventually they do upgrade but sysadmins know it’s a problem and try to avoid it.

Now if your working with other people you need to think before upgrading and more important ASK before doing it so you don’t break everyone’s code.

The reason I’m blogging  about this is that it has happen twice in the past month, ironically with the same platform. Without going into the details of why I disagree with your upgrade it’s a matter of form rather then the fact itself. In both cases I have had the same two answers:

1. because it’s better
2. because I had that installed (one admit it the other left it implicit)

When confronted for a explanation of #1 both gave a fussy reason, mostly linked to all the hype around how great it’s performance is, now in both cases this was premature optimization because the system hasn’t been run ones. No really neither system is in production and it needs at least 2 months of work before it can even hope to.

So what piss me off was #2 your imposing on me your “in the edge” without looking at the consequences in the last case. I’m100% sure the overall project lost at least 10 hours of productivity because of this, this is because they are all newbie, so think about the first time you ran some code compiled for JVM 1,x,y and ran it on JVM 1,x,w and you will see how it adds up correctly. Add to that having to re-target all your tools to run on top of the new JVM, or you forgot about your tomcat instance? yes you did since your email says classpath.

Now I’m fine from you running the kernel off Andrew Morton tree, compiling everything by hard (using -o9 if you still think that’s good), that’s fine I do it on some of MY stuff. but I do not expect everyone to keep up, and you shouldn’t too.