Ask Slashdot: A Development Environment Still Usable In 25 Years Time?

pev writes: I'm working on an embedded project that will need to be maintainable for the next 25 years. This raises the interesting question of how this can be best supported. The obvious solution seems to be to use a VM that has a portable disk image that can be moved to any emulators in the future (the build environment is currently based around Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / x86_64) but how do you predict what vendors / hardware will be available in 25 years? Is anyone currently supporting software of a similar age that can share lessons learned from experience? Where do you choose to draw the line between handling likely issues and making things overly complicated?

Comments

Will the Linux kernel even be around in 5 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a user of Linux since the early days of Yggdrasil, and I still use it today. I've never been as uncertain about the future of the Linux kernel as I am right now. All of the major Linux distros have switched to systemd. Systemd is handling more and more functionality every day. I would not be at all surprised if it starts to subsume more and more of the Linux kernel's functionality. The Linux kernel will eventually be nothing more than a second-stage bootloader, at which point it starts to become very irrelevant. I could easily see the Linux kernel being discarded in favor of systemd.

25 years is a long time from now. I don't see how we can ponder what things will be like then when it's very possible that so much of today's important software, like the Linux kernel, won't even be relevant in as soon as 5 years.