I’ve had that kind of reaction - on rebases also - and most times it was in fact a code smell pointing to a case of spaghetti code.
If you get to the point that you fear upstream merges/rebases into your WIP, stop for a second and ask yourself if maybe that might be an issue with too much interpendencies inside the code itself. Code should be as close to an directed acrylic graph as possible. (doesn’t count, I was not speaking of git! :b )
Each and every line of code you write is a liability. Even more so when you wrote it for someone else. You must always be able to rebuild it from source, at least as long as your client expect the software to work. If you feel it’s not worth it, you probably low-balled the contract. If you don’t want to maintain code, have the client pay a yearly maintenance fee, give the code and the responsibility to maintain it to your client at the end of development, or add a time limit to it’s support.
There’s no “maintenance mode” software: either it’s in use and must be kept updated with regard to it’s execution environment, or it’s not used anymore and can be erased and forgotten. Doing differently opens too much security issues, which shouldn’t be acceptable for us all as a trade.
Subjective take: there’s worse than FreeCAD - sure it’s a bit “old school” but it’s bearable. O. The other hand, the solver has crashed on me so many times… The workbench way of doing things requires some time to get usdmed to, sure, but a crashing solver is far worse.
That’s a lot of words for “I’m too lazy to master the most essential tool of my professional life and keep it updated to my requirements”.
If you don’t want to do it, feel free to pay an Ubuntu support subscription, open a ticket, and get back to work. As you said: you should be working on your problem instead of whining. Or maybe you earn more whining?
There’s a saying that goes like that: “To a bad workman, there’s always bad tools.”
A merge from upstream once a day, at the beginning of the day.
I’m working on a DevOps setting, and even though we’re a small team, we have about two to three changes going through the pipeline a day.
If you keep your fork too long without syncing, it just get more complicated to merge, and more importantly if you need help from the upstream change author they’ll have moved on to another subject and the change won’t be as fresh in their mind as if you had merged the day after they pushed it.