alt Hacker News> If a perfectly good piece of software hasn't been updated in years because it hasn't needed to be updated
This. When people say "I wouldn't use this because it hasn't been updated for years", maybe it's because it doesn't need updating?
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Depends on what it is, for anything that uses a web interface or runs as a native app I'd question many years without updates just because the deployment targets shift so much. Most of the apps I really enjoy on the Mac, for example, at least get yearly updates to whatever new MacOS API changes occurred in the major release.
A video game emulator getting an update every decade though? Some low level tool that's never changed since the beginning of time? Yeah, they're done, what's the problem.
The problem is, how do you know what does not need maintaing? how do you know what's going to bite you in the future? And migrating might be a huge effort. So, the instict becomes to not pick something that is already giving you an negative signal.
I'm not saying that I fully agree with that logic, but I think it's a pretty understandable behaviour.
maybe it's because it doesn't need updating
The ground shifts under software. OSs change, dependencies get updates, engines change, compilers are improved occasionally in ways that aren't backwardly compatible. If the maintainer isn't at least checking it's not broken, and updating a changelog to say that it's still working, then you can't safely assume it's fine. "Not updated for years" is shorthand for "It could be broken, but I don't want to be the person who goes through the effort of checking."
If you want people to run your code against a set of pinned dependencies from the last time it was updated then that's one thing, but if you people to run it with an up-to-date set of dependencies on a new OS and on the latest compiler or runtime, then you can't just say it's 'done', because things can change outside of your code that means it won't work any more.