Re:Time to hand over the reins before Capistrano costs me my...
by regularfry on Monday October 07, 2013 @07:28AM
(#6507511)
Maybe "wasting asset" is a better metaphor. At some point, there'll come an OS release on which that Ruby won't even build (and this can happen sooner than you'd think - 1.8.7 needs to be patched to build on Wheezy, for instance; by the time Jessie goes stable 1.9.3 will probably have been deprecated and unsupported too). At that point, you're forced into porting to a newer Ruby just so you can keep up with security patches to the underlying OS. It might not be "technical debt" per se, but it's definitely a maintenance cost.
Why?
Why can't you have a stable app using Ruby 1.9 that hasn't need any updates (other than security) in three years running on the same machine that also runs another newer application which uses Ruby 2.0 and Rails 4?
To me, that's not "technical debt".