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Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now?Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now?Posted Jul 7, 2010 19:43 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)In reply to: Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? by nlucas Parent article: Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now?
Yes, the proportion of incompetent developers is roughly constant across systems. In any case, MSFT advertised a program written by them to work as long as certain requirements were met, and they were met by WinNT. It just didn't work, period. No, MSFT didn't "decide security was more important", they just pulled the rug out from under antivirus vendors when they decided to (try to) take over that segment. "Writing a complex application that works on every Linux system" is reasonably easy (much easier than it was to write anything to run on a reasonable range of Unix systems back when), as long as you ship source. If you try to ship binaries, you are out of luck.
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Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 7, 2010 21:31 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> "Writing a complex application that works on every Linux system" is reasonably easy (much easier than it was to write anything to run on a reasonable range of Unix systems back when), as long as you ship source. If you try to ship binaries, you are out of luck.
From my personal experience, even shipping binaries of complex applications is easier than people believe. As long as you are willing to build them for all the architectures you want to support (most likely the two x86 ones).
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 8, 2010 11:13 UTC (Thu) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
Well, one thing I agree. Shipping binaries it's the easy part.
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 8, 2010 11:23 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Well, one thing I agree. Shipping binaries it's the easy part.
When I said "shipping", I included building and solving binary compatiblilty issues in that. It really isn't too hard - build on the oldest system you want to support, decide what dependencies you can rely on the system to provide and ship the rest static, load a couple of things at runtime if in doubt. There are still a couple of gotchas (the autopackage web page has good information on the subject, although C++ ABIs are no longer a problem, and glibc is getting better at not pulling in new features unless you actually use them), but it is still quite feasible. And once you have solved the problems, they stay solved on the whole.
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 8, 2010 11:31 UTC (Thu) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
Right. That's exactly what I was agreeing to.
And the current C++ ABI stability plays a big part in that, contrary to the hell it was earlier (and worst on Windows because there were more than one mainstream compiler).
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 8, 2010 11:35 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> And the current C++ ABI stability plays a big part in that, contrary to the hell it was earlier (and worst on Windows because there were more than one mainstream compiler).
I thought that Windows people used COM for ABI because it is well defined.
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 8, 2010 15:25 UTC (Thu) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
COM has nothing to do with C++ objects, although there are Microsoft C++ extensions to the language to make it easy to work with it inside C++.
You can use COM in a pure C program.
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 8, 2010 15:18 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> although C++ ABIs are no longer a problem
Hm. Unfortunately, I think they will be again at some point soon. It sounds like when G++'s C++0x support is finalized, they're going to have to change the ABI of std::string and maybe a few other core classes. (okay, so, that's not a C++ ABI break, only an STL ABI change).
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 12, 2010 13:25 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Do you have any reliable sources that state this?
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? Posted Jul 15, 2010 14:51 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
There have been discussions to this effect on the GCC mailing list. It's not unsubstantiated scuttlebutt. (Perhaps a way will yet be found to avoid a std::string ABI change, but none is yet evident.)
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