who has a Mac? everyone! [LWN.net]

who has a Mac? everyone!

Posted Nov 18, 2009 19:45 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: who has a Mac? everyone! by dlang
Parent article: The Future of Linux is Google (PCWorld)

At the company I work for, we develop an application that has binaries available for Windows, OSX and Linux. It's partly open source, but there are closed source plugins, and in any case, given our development model, nearly everyone uses the binary installer anyway. I'm not sure whether the app is within the definition of commercial software -- but there is no volunteer work done on it.

We use Qt, of course, otherwise we wouldn't be able to develop the software with 3 to 5 developers. And on Windows and Linux we use bitrock to create an installer. We only target 32-bits linux, though some people have compiled the open source parts on 65 bits linux, mostly gentoo. It works perfectly fine on my OpenSUSE and Kubuntu systems. We have about 60,000 Windows users, about 5000 OSX users and about 300 Linux users.

Despite having a lot of automatic tests, all operating systems give us pain: on OSX it's hard to support 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 with one binary, and besides, we've only ever got access to the latest Apple hard and software, For Windows, side-by-side errors are bad. One version of Visual C++ actually creates corrupt manifests, The differences between XP, Vista and Windows 7 are particularly time-consuming. For Linux, the biggest problem is running the autotests: our test machine doesn't have X11... And we had a lot of problems with different versions of gstreamer.

All in all, if you develop your commercial desktop software using Qt, use the Bitrock installer and have decent automated tests, providing your application for 32 bit linux as well doesn't cost a lot of extra effort.

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who has a Mac? everyone!

Posted Nov 18, 2009 20:06 UTC (Wed) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

How does Bitrock handle .so dependencies (even Qt itself) in different distributions?

The (only?) positive thing about Windows is that binary compatibility between OS versions is an explicit goal. While I still was a Windows developer we had no problems moving software (including our kernel drivers) between NT4, W2K and later to XP. Of course I don't claim this is universal, because our packages were pretty self contained. Also, i realize that Vista introduced more significant changes and breakages compared to, say, XP.

who has a Mac? everyone!

Posted Nov 18, 2009 20:25 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

window's binary compatibility is like Java's source compatibility. it works all the time, except when it doesn't

yes it's a goal, and yes it works a lot of the time. but it doesn't always work.

for linux systems, you can take just about any binary from one distro and run it on another distro. the .so files are all named the same way so if they are there everything works.

the cross-linux-distro problem is more a matter of how to make sure that all the right packages are there, and where are all the config files than anything else.

there are a lot of companies selling software for linux, many of them charging lots of money for their software. some of them take a hard line attitude like 'we only certify RHEL 5.0, if you upgrade to RHEL 5.1 you are on your own', but many of the recognise that the distros are all more the same than they are different and instead say 'we have tested this on RHEL 5.0, it should work on anything else, contact us if you have problems'

the companies that take the first attitude are very slow to support any new distros or releases, frequently when a customer says 'I will buy your product if you support distro X' (I've done this to a few products).

companies that take the second attitude tend to be much faster to add 'supported' distros to their list.

who has a Mac? everyone!

Posted Nov 18, 2009 21:30 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Basically, you package everything you need, Certainly all the Qt libraries you use, but also other libraries, we're not using the system Qt. It doesn't solve everything: the gstreamer problem I mentioned above was because we didn't want to package gstreamer as well, and the gstreamer on ubuntu and gstreamer on OpenSUSE weren't binary compatible, so when we packaged the Qt Phonon library, which uses gstreamer, we had problems. (Of course, Phonon couldn't play mp3's on XP, but could play wav's while it was the other way around on Vista.)

The set of libraries we package is almost the same on Windows, OSX and Linux, by the way. On Windows we have to package the c runtime, as well, that is the main difference.