Women are like software: If you’re new to it, everything is exciting and awesome, all the fancy things, the bells and whistles you discover make you happy and feel better. As time moves on you’re getting more used to it, try to master the software f.e. by using shortcuts, customize it and so on. And there are times where you find bugs. As a free software hacker you’re of course up to fixing the bugs yourself and report the patches to upstream.
But what happens if upstream does not accept them? What if the whole patchwork you’re doing cannot fix the ground architecture of the software, so it would be better to rewrite it from scratch, or, move to another, new fancy software which apparently fixes all the issues of the old one? Maybe you don’t give up on your old, beloved fellow so fast, so you look for and hire consulting for the software to better understand the inner workings of it. But, what if you still don’t get the grasp?
Of course its not that easy to switch to another software, you’ve got very used to it over the years, even developed a particular plugin exactly for it, which would probably not fit into any other look-a-like. And you really love your plugin, since you’ve written and cared about it for endless hours, but its almost sure it would keep plugged into the old software. How would you decide?
Unfortunately, the decision to move on is incredibly harder to take in real life than with computer software:
$ apt-get install new
Warning: new conflicts with old
Deleting packages: old
Installing packages: new
Do you wish to apply these changes [y|N]?
eep… good luck with however you decide to handle this “software” problem.