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From: "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Listing currently maintained libraries for Ada
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:58:25 -0500
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Date: 2012-06-15T17:58:25-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 6/15/2012 4:41 PM, Robert A Duff wrote:

>
> Didn't Donald Knuth announce at some point that TeX was "done" or
> "bug free" or some such?  And therefore gave it a version number
> of "exactly pi"?
>

True. But even though Tex is still is frozen, Latex is
still being added to all the time. Tex is the core
engine, but layers and layers of Latex is build on
top of it. There was Latex2, now Latex3, and millions
of lines of code in CTAN is being added all the time
as packages on top of Tex.

I do not believe that a software library can ever not go
continuous maintenance.  There is always more testing
to be done, more features to add, make the software
more robust, test against new changes outside of
the control of the library.

Software that does not change, means it is not used
much. Software that is used by many, means there
is always new functionality needed, enhancement requests,
bug fixes, test cases added, etc...

Software for me is a living thing. Stop taking care of
it, stop feeding it, stop growing it, it will die soon.

If it does not die on its own, something better will come
along, with better features, and replace it.

--Nasser