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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."

4 of 709 comments (clear)

  1. NetBSD? by Bananatree3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The development of netBSD to over 40 different platforms has brought a lot of good development to many different platforms that would have been dominated by mono-operating systems. A good instance is the handheld devices platforms (HPC,Palm PC, etc.), which would otherwise be dominated by Windows CE (except for the few Linux Palm PC's, but majority are WinCE). The development of netBSD for the majority of platforms has reached great maturity, and it is still developing well.

  2. Hypocritical by Temporal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you write your code to be portable in the first place, fixing platform-specific issues should be quick and easy.

    And, of course, you write your code to be portable because you make sure it runs on the big three: Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

    Right?

    Actually, I think a much larger problem is just that: Many OSS developers don't even try to support Windows. Yes, I know you hate the OS and don't want to support Microsoft, etc., etc.. But, how can you complain about major software not supporting Linux when you're writing your own software that doesn't support Windows? Isn't that entirely hypocritical?

    My take: Port your software to every platform you can, especially Windows. This gives freedom of OS to your users. And if you're a Linux user yourself, you should understand just how valuable and important this freedom is.

  3. Re:I call bad c code by TCM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Very good point. Supporting minority platforms is only troublesome if your code is riddled with i386isms and lazy coding practices. If you do it right the first time with always portability in mind, not only will you get cleaner and more maintainable code, you also get the ability to run just anywhere as a bonus. My prime example as usual is NetBSD.

    It's sad that whenever you build some GNU sources or the latest Linux app du jour you get tons of warnings. Some projects even compile their files with 2>&1 >/dev/null. How sad is that?

    It's not just the Linux folks. OpenSSL is actually worrying me: /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(85): warning: pointer casts may be troublesome [247] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(94): warning: pointer casts may be troublesome [247] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: bitwise operation on signed value possibly nonportable [117] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: possible pointer alignment problem [135] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: pointer casts may be troublesome [247] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: possible pointer alignment problem [135] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: pointer casts may be troublesome [247] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: possible pointer alignment problem [135] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: pointer casts may be troublesome [247] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: possible pointer alignment problem [135] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: pointer casts may be troublesome [247] /x/s.NetBSD.netbsd-3/crypto/dist/openssl/crypto/de s/fcrypt_b.c(111): warning: bitwise operation on signed value possibly nonportable [117]

    etc. etc.

    And this in a project that's driving quite an amount of sites, authentication mechanism and what not?

    Most if not all of the sources that are native to NetBSD, i.e. not imported like OpenSSL and GCC compile without any warning. You automatically get a good feeling about using it.

    Something needs to change in coding land.

    </rant>

    --
    Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
  4. Re:Straw man by Nasarius · · Score: 4, Interesting
    (but has no access to AIX targets).

    With a project as big and important as GCC, you'd think they'd have a server for each platform set up for all their developers to play with. Gentoo has Sparc, MIPS, PPC, etc. boxes for their developers to use for porting software.

    It seems to me that a smart idea would be to have some kind of system where a developer could submit a patch, which would then be sent out to a server farm, where each server would try to compile GCC with the patch, then run a test suite. Doesn't Mozilla do something like this nightly?

    "I don't have access to a [foo] box" should never be a valid excuse with larger projects.

    --
    LOAD "SIG",8,1