[q-big]

> Maintenance is stuff like "make an adapter for foo" or "deal with the format change" or "the new version of windows exposess this bug, fix it".

This can nevertheless be quite challenging and exciting: such new requirements often lead to a revision of the assumptions underlying the architecture of the software and thus - in the long term - lead to lots of small improvements in the software architecture that add uo.

The problem rather is that such maintenance tasks are often not very esteemed (both to managers and other programmers).