| |||||||||||||
On stabilityOn stabilityPosted Sep 9, 2010 6:54 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)In reply to: On stability by drag Parent article: Debian squeezes out Chromium
>> Indeed. But the bigger issue, I think, is: what makes Firefox and Chromium so special that they have to pop out a major new, compatibility-busting release every few months?
>It's probably related to the issue of how Linux distributions can't give enough of a crap to put serious effort to care about binary compatibility with applications. You know; so it's possible for software vendors to provide and users to take advantage of newer features in newer software and/or rely on proven older software without tearing their hair out.
You have that entirely backward. Linux distributions are the *only* ones that end up actually addressing library compatibility issues. Software vendors used to systems with no sensible library system (Windows and OS X) treat Linux exactly the same way, either because they want to have a pile of forked upstream libraries without pushing those changes upstream or maintaining a real library fork, or simply because they don't care about handling Linux correctly and the least common denominator requires shipping everything with the application.
Meanwhile, Linux distributions get stuck trying to figure out whether they can build each crazy upstream application against the system version of the library without breaking whatever crazy assumptions the bundled version allowed, and without rewriting large parts of the application's build system.
(Log in to post comments)
On stability Posted Sep 9, 2010 9:06 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
> or simply because they don't care about handling Linux correctly and the least common denominator requires shipping everything with the application.
There is also the fragmentation that makes handling things correctly harder. From the perspective of the software vendor "Desktop Linux" is a blip in the radar, and a very fragmented one. (How many Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian etc versions are there to test against?)
The software vendor can rationally decide that there will be less users hit by a bug if they put even more resources testing it on Windows and MAC/OS than trying to test things on this large matrix of different Linux distributions and all their versions in use.
On stability Posted Sep 9, 2010 17:05 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
That's what "unstable" versions of distributions are for; users of those distributions will happily do the testing for you, and report a pile of bugs either upstream or by way of the distribution. That still doesn't explain shipping the (modified) source code to umpteen libraries in the application source tree.
"Handling things correctly" doesn't mean "test with every obscure Linux distribution", or even "test with the top N distributions". It means "make sure it builds in whatever reasonably up-to-date distribution the developers run, handle shared library versioning sanely, document the list of build dependencies, let Linux distributions package it, and work with them when they report bugs to you".
|
|||||||||||||