Legacy Code Bug Fixes

But these are "significant problems with the code" which evidently can't be fixed by simply reverting relevant changes. In that case, it seems more likely to me that these are due to long-standing issues which would have caught up to the company sooner or later.

Ah, I see, thanks for the explanation. I imagine that if you're using someone else's codebase, you'd be in a much worse position to fix bugs immediately, I hadn't considered that.

I've heard some VFX professionals mention that they got told certain bugs can't be fixed because the codebase is too old and complicated, and they are used to the software crashing randomly on a regular basis.If people have no alternative in their field or the alternative requires discarding years of experience, the incentive to fix bugs isn't as high as it could be. That's how you get problems like Excel invalidating data with automatic formatting for decades.

I think a reasonable explanation may be that other customers possibly have come to unknowingly rely on some of the bugs. Shipping a fix of all the bugs could actually break their code!

.. sorry to hear about the frustration, but almost all of these are ordinary problems with application development. Maybe the original developer made a mess, but that is ordinary too.. if you have a short-list of hmm .. ways to solve typical problems, in a workflow you like, in a language and functions you like.. then you can bring those to the new efforts.. production technical engineering groups will sometimes just bid to remake the whole thing, using their own ways, for exactly these reasons.

>You'll often be stuck with code that you know is flawed, that you want to fix, but the organisation won't give you time to fix it until it's too late.This has unfortunately been my experience as well. Although in some sense I can understand it now. When only ~10k normal people per year use something, the chances of one of them trying to kill it are apparently pretty low. Although I'm still convinced at some point it is going to happen.

I dunno... the odd bug fix has the potential to really screw things up, when the person fixing it isn't the person who wrote it originally, or it's been months since then.

Thou who reimplements code is doomed to reimplement bugs as well.

That's equivalent of patching a legacy code base and delaying the problem not exactly fixing the root cause.

It's a complicated and huge codebase created by many people. It will have bugs.