bug history; stability vs features
Posted Jul 11, 2006 4:29 UTC (Tue) by
xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
In reply to:
bug history; stability vs features by sanjoy
Parent article:
Survey: Linux kernel quality
Thankyou Sanjoy for reporting your bugs and seeing through the process of
getting them analysed and fixed. It is users like you who make Linux
stable and usable for the rest of us (lazy freeloaders that we are :-).
> TeX, which is rock solid.
> I think Linux needs to move towards the TeX side of the extreme.
TeX is rock solid because it takes a well-defined input and produces a
well-defined output, and those basic requirements have not changed in
decades. It differs in sophistication but not in kind from filters like
cat, awk and grep, which are similarly solid.
Software which serves such ill-specified requirements as 'support every
piece of junk hardware in the world', 'run the buggy binary ACPI scripts
on laptop X without turning it into a brick' and 'placate the pundits
who claim Free Software is not ready for the desktop' are necessarily
rapidly evolving and therefore more error-prone.
It is unfortunate that the Linux kernel core falls into this category and
not that of a stable filter, but unavoidable. Users who require a
rock-solid base to their systems always have the alternative of sticking
to their old hardware and older kernels, or even switching to another OS
which is developed with solidity, and not features, as first priority.
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