Some unreliable predictions for 2015

Posted Jan 15, 2015 4:39 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Some unreliable predictions for 2015 by dlang
Parent article: Some unreliable predictions for 2015

All interesting points to be sure but I'd be more interested in imaging what would need to happen to make this work, a Linux Foundation Standard ABI would look a lot like an enterprise distro, maybe shipping new versions of leaf software (like Firefox) but never breaking core software, or a proprietary system like Mac OS X. Right now every distro claims to be suitable for end-user deployment and a target for third party development, that would be true if there were comprehensive compatibility standards, or only one dominant vendor to support, but there are not so every distros advertising is false on this point.

These deployment and compatibility problems have been solved on the proprietary platforms, some of which are even based on Linux, and the Linux kernel team provides the same or better ABI compatibility that many proprietary systems offer, why can't userspace library developers and distros have the same level of quality control that the kernel has?

Some unreliable predictions for 2015

Posted Jan 15, 2015 9:28 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> why can't userspace library developers and distros have the same level of quality control that the kernel has?

Maybe because too much userspace software is written by Computer Science guys, and the kernel is run by an irrascible engineer?

There is FAR too much reliance on theory in the computer space in general, and linux (the OS, not kernel) is no exception. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that the database realm in particular has been seriously harmed by this ... :-)

There are far too few engineers out there - people who say "I want it to work in practice, not in theory".

Cheers,
Wol

Some unreliable predictions for 2015

Posted Feb 2, 2015 20:34 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

There is FAR too much reliance on theory in the computer space in general, and linux (the OS, not kernel) is no exception.

This may be true in the database realm you're singlemindedly focussed on (and I suspect in that respect it is only true with respect to one single theory which you happen to dislike and which, to be honest, RDBMS's implement about as closely as they implement flying to Mars), but it's very far from true everywhere else. GCC gained hugely from its switch to a representation that allowed it to actually use algorithms from the published research. The developers of most things other than compilers and Mesa aren't looking at research of any kind. In many cases, there is no research of any kind to look at.