| |||||||||||||
On stabilityOn stabilityPosted Sep 9, 2010 9:06 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265)In reply to: On stability by josh Parent article: Debian squeezes out Chromium
> 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.
(Log in to post comments)
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".
|
|||||||||||||