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Porting Open Source to Minor Platforms is Harmful

Posted by samzenpus on from the do-one-thing-at-a-time dept.

Tamerlan writes "Ulrich Drepper posted a blog entry titled "Dictatorship of Minorities". He argues that open source projects' attempts to support non-mainstream (read "non-Linux") operating systems slow down development and testing. While Ulrich may be biased (he is a RedHat employee) he has the point: if you ever read mailing list of any large open source project, you know that significant piece of traffic is about platform-specific bugs or a new release broken on some exotic platform."

2 of 709 comments (clear)

  1. Axe to grind by Dan+Berlin · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a GCC developer (bias: I work for IBM Research), the only time i've ever seen David Edelsohn complain about something not working on AIX, it was broken on other significant platforms as well (Cygwin, etc), or was latently buggy and just working by luck.

    Judge for yourself. Go read the gcc list. Count the number of patches backed out in the past year because they broke AIX vs because they broke some other platform.

    It sounds like an unnecessary personal snipe, which, for people who know Uli, well, i won't bother finishing that.

    So if this is the most "notorious case" Ulrich's got, then he's wrong.

    Particularly the "GCC would be developed much faster".
    That is in fact, the funniest thing i've heard all day.

    GCC would be developed faster if there was less sniping and fiefdom's and more collaboration. Which, except for a few people, has been what is generally happening. Our development process is accelerating, not slowing down.

    And It certainly isn't slowed down because people need to bootstrap on AIX, which they don't.

    Nobody has ever required patches be bootstrapped on AIX unless it is very likely to have some material affect on that platform.

    This is just the same requirement we pose for any wide ranging change: Test it by compiling it for the architectures it is likely to break on.

    Note i didn't say running. We don't require anyone have AIX boxen around. Cross compiles work fine.

    Though if you break some architecture, you are expected to at least try to help the maintainer of that arch fix it.

  2. The title of this article is not correct. by Nailer · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wait a sec...

    Porting Open Source to Minor Platforms is Harmful

    What the fuck? Where'd you get that from? Read Ulrichs post. How about:

    Delaying the development of features because of problems with minority platforms that can't be fixed by the bug reporters is Harmful

    You may disagree, but unlike the title of this article, it does actually cover what Ulrich is talking about.