That depends on how you define "maintenance".

To me if you're actively building new features, that's not maintenance, that's development. The fact that people are using the software as you're developing it doesn't change the fact that it is under development. You obviously use the term "maintenance" differently.

What I'd call "maintenance" is roughly equivalent to what you were calling "minimal maintenance" earlier. Granted, there is more of a gradual decline here rather than a bright dividing line. But the distinction is real.

In that state a project needs much less development. But software stays in that state for much longer periods of time - frequently decades. And when bugs come up, the maintainer likely has not seen the relevant code in a long period of time, which makes everything that much more difficult to deal with. These two factors together are what causes so much aggregate expense in software which is changing at a glacial pace.

In reply to Re^8: Reinvent the wheel! by tilly
in thread Reinvent the wheel! by telemachus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.