[alexott]

10 years ago I’ve attended a talk from one of German car producer - they talked about 25+ years of software maintenance. You invest into tools 5 years before release to market, and they should work 20 years after release. So companies need to plan the whole cycle not only code maintenance

[nijave]

It goes all the way down the stack, too. I talked to someone working on CI at Nvidia and they were testing up build toolchain to ensure some of their hardware accelerated libraries could be rebuilt in 10+ years (for automotive industry customers). The work mostly involved dynamic systems for ensuring the builds worked without an internet connection (monitoring network activity to make sure everything was cached/saved correctly).

[cpeterso]

> The work mostly involved dynamic systems for ensuring the builds worked without an internet connection (monitoring network activity to make sure everything was cached/saved correctly).

Documenting and archiving your build tools is also important. I knew a team that checked everything into source control, even Visual Studio. This ensures the tools were all preserved, everyone is using the same versions, and the code is synchronized with the tool versions.