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A comment on Software-dependent devices: do they now need expiration dates?. Parent comment

Re:Software-dependent devices: do they now need expiration d... by taeric on Friday February 07, 2020 @05:16PM (#22271687)
Not really. There is literally precedent in this regard. TeX is stable. Very stable.

Has it been extended? Yes. And some extensions can be seen as borderline required. But I'm not unconvinced that one of the biggest factors in this is that he tried to make it stable. And showed great restraint in what requirements to go after.

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Re:Software-dependent devices: do they now need expiration d... by oneplane on Friday February 07, 2020 @05:56PM (#22272043)
Which TeX? Over the last 10 years, over 20 serious and critical vulnerabilities have been found in various TeX implementations. They were all fixed via... maintenance.
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Re:Software-dependent devices: do they now need expiration d... by taeric on Friday February 07, 2020 @06:49PM (#22272439)
How many of those were extensions? Pdftex, as an example, is not TeX. There have been roughly, what, eight releases in TeX since version 3? Hence we are now at 3.14159265.

This is not to say things couldn't have been done better. But I love that all of my documents still compile just fine. Modern practices? Nope.

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Re:Software-dependent devices: do they now need expiration d... by taeric on Sunday February 09, 2020 @08:18PM (#22285628)
Coming back to this after a few days. I also can't help but take a double take at 20 vulnerabilities in 10 years being a serious criticism. Is the implicit claim that this is a bad record compared to other software legit? (Honest question.)
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