Maintaining old software with no sign of retirement

There's a lot of really old software out there. Some of it has simply been abandoned; others have been replaced by new versions. But old software never really goes away, and we end up maintaining it.

This is especially tricky when old software depends on other old software, and we have to support the entire dependency tree.

There's always python2 and python 3. Some old software may never be fixed; some current software has consciously decided to stick to python 2. Distributions will be shipping python 2 for a long time yet.

Then there's PCRE and PCRE2. Some things have been updated; others haven't. Generally for this I'll keep updating, and eventually upstream might get around to migrating. But again I'll have to ship both for a while.

And then there's gtk2 and gtk3. (I find it ironic that the gimp itself is still using gtk2.) There's no end in sight of the need to ship both.

Some libraries have been deprecated entirely. the old libXp (the X printing library) is long gone. There were a couple of things built against it in Tribblix. I've just rebuilt chimera (a really old Xaw web browser if your memory doesn't go that far back) which was one consumer and now isn't; the other one was Motif (there's a convenient build flag --disable-printing to disable libXp support, which entertainingly breaks the build someplace else which I ended up having to fix).

Another example, libpng has gone through several different revisions. Each slightly incompatible, and you have to be sure to run with the same version you built against. At least you can ship all the different versions, as they have the version in the names. Mind you, linking against 2 different versions of libpng at the same time (for example, if a dependency pulls in a different version of libpng) is a bad thing, so I did have to rebuild a number of applications to avoid that. I ship the old libpng versions in a separate compat package, I think chimera was the only consumer, but I updated that to use a more current libpng.

A slightly different problem is the use of newer toolchains. Compilers are getting stricter over time, so old unmaintained software needs patches to even compile.

Don't even get me started on openssl.