Fedora considers user metrics [LWN.net]

Fedora considers user metrics

Posted Nov 30, 2006 16:53 UTC (Thu) by pjones (subscriber, #31722)
In reply to: Fedora considers user metrics by drag
Parent article: Fedora considers user metrics

Actually I think that at least that 'PPC debugging' is pretty bad example.

Look at this way.. In a linux distribution there realy isn't much that is very hardware dependent. Aside from endian issues not many people need to be terribly concerned about weither their software runs on x86 vs PPC vs Arm or whatnot unless they are trying to tricks to improve performance.

As one of the developers who spends way more time debugging PPC machines than he'd like, I completely, totally disagree. These type of bugs aren't just endian issues or the like. They're "this driver is only on this platform", or "the bootloader doesn't work right on this machine". There are also bugs that exist on other platforms, but which only get *seen* on some architectures, for various reasons. For FC5, for example, allocating a new tty while using fbcon caused the console's color palette to be reset -- this was a serious installation issue that took a not-insignificant amount of time.

There are *plenty* of 'only this one platform' types of bugs, and they take a lot of time. So no, it's not really a poor example.

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