Re: [Bug-wget] Support of non-linux OS's going down the drain?

[H.Merijn Brand]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 12:06:03 -0700, Micah Cowan <address@hidden>
wrote:

bringing it back to the list ...

> You seem to think that I am angry or upset with you (or others) for some

No, that just proves *I* sounded too harsch.

> reason. This is not so. And especially not for providing valuable 
> feedback, for which I (and Giuseppe, I'm sure) am truly grateful.
> 
> The only thing I was taking issue to was your subject heading, "Support 
> of non-linux OS's going down the drain?", because I think it's a bit 
> unfair to judge support for OSses that are hard for us to test, and that 
> no one wants to test during development.

That might have been influenced by very recent experiences in many
other projects that seems to prove that especially *young* (but
enthusiastic) programmers forget that OS's other than Linux might not
have available what their favourite Linux distro has available by
default. A new dependency is very very costly.

> Neither am I "upset" that no one tests the alpha tarball packages, as 
> seems to be your impression. I'm just pointing out that, since no one 
> does, the "testing" then must happen after release, and so there's 
> normally a series of patch releases following shortly afterwards, to 
> improve support for less often-tested OSes. This has been true for every 
> recent major release, as far as I can tell. It doesn't mean that support 
> for other OSses has gone down the drain; just means it needs a little 
> time to catch up.

Ah right. There I indeed misinterpreted your original reply.

> Thanks for your help, and please do keep doing your part to help improve 
> wget.
> 
> -mjc
> 
> On 08/19/2011 11:38 AM, H.Merijn Brand wrote:
> > On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:48:12 -0700, Micah Cowan<address@hidden>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> On 08/19/2011 12:18 AM, H.Merijn Brand wrote:
> >>
> >>> With HP-UX 11.00 and HP C-ANSI-C it doesn't even *compile* anymore!
> >>
> >> (Re "Support of non-linux OS's going down the drain?")
> >
> > I fully understand below statement, but I do not feel "guilty".
> >
> > I am close to full-time perl-tester. I invented the core-smoking
> > process, that helps the perl5 development team to acquire test results
> > for most architectures and operating systems without the testers
> > actually being involved (though most testers actually get involved or
> > get more interested than originally planned, which is a good thing).
> >
> > Our test bed runs on AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Windows and even OpenVMS and
> > gives us a day-to-day overview of what patches break what.
> >
> > Note however that there are many many opensource projects, and that
> > none of us have enough CPU cycles available to test more than one or
> > two projects actively. I'm a perl5 committer, which makes me someone
> > dedicated to perl5, but with a very clear and open view to problems
> > other projects have on less active or available OS versions.
> >
> > That said, I will always feedback the problems and sometimes the
> > solutions that I encounter in other projects. I'll give some example
> > from the very recent past that took quite a bit of my precious free
> > time.
> >
> > 1. Together with someone from the GNU gcc team we tracked down a bug
> >     in the assembler part of gcc itself that caused gcc to not only
> >     generate invalid assembly, but eventually caused gcc itself to
> >     crash in certain C code. Now fixed, will be part of gcc-4.6.2
> >
> > 2. SQLite code would not compile on HP-UX 11.00 and older under
> >     certain conditions. Together with some others, we analyzed the
> >     problem and found a fix
> >
> > 3. I gave a patch to the authors of ccache to enable running on both
> >     HP-UX and AIX.
> >
> > 4. I implemented (longer ago now) a way to allow grep to use PCRE in
> >     regular expressions. That is now - heavily changed - available as
> >     -P option
> >
> > 5. I helped implementing PCRE patterns in 'less' search algorithms
> >
> > 6. I gave a lot of feedback to the people that create and maintain git.
> >     It now runs out of the box on most HP-UX.
> >
> > These are all actions done together with others in tight cooperation.
> > Feedback is vital.
> >
> > I might be the last one on this planet to still have *recent*
> > opensource projects as prebuilt binary software depots available for
> > most versions of HP-UX that are abandoned by HP. If I look at the
> > amount of downloads for e.g. HP-UX 10.20, which I consider long dead,
> > I see a proof that we -as open software community - make an awful lot
> > of people very very happy.
> >
> > Help comes in grades. Feedback is one form of them. I certainly feel
> > your angry when you say that "others" (including me) did not test
> > pre-releases or test releases. I however just don't have the time to
> > test each and every opensource project I ever use *for every release*.
> >
> > I mean, I just use wget. I used version 1.10/1 for a long time, until I
> > ran into a problem. A new version is available, and I download it, run
> > the documented build process (configuration, make, make test, make
> > install) for those projects, and I report back what I find. If theere
> > is an easy fix, I'll add that in my feedback.
> >
> > I am not trying to criticize anyone either. I'm just trying to explain
> > that your problems are others problems too and that tuits are not free.
> > One needs a serious amount of motivation to actively participate in
> > improving open source. I try to take part in that process, but my time
> > and motivation is also limited. I also realize that most motivated
> > developers are NOT on devious OS's like Solaris, AIX, HP-UX or (Open)VMS
> >
> >> If folks would like to see better support for non-GNU/Linux platforms,
> >> then folks using those platforms might do well to help test the software
> >> when test tarballs are released. There is one primary developer, and a
> >> smattering of sporadic contributors, and every time a release is made,
> >> the maintainer is always dismayed to find that all of a sudden people
> >> find all their particular platform bugs at that time.
> >>
> >> No one ever seems to pay much attention to the test packages that people
> >> make available, sometimes several months in advance, and the maintainer
> >> surely lacks the resources to test on many different platforms
> >> (particularly ones that don't lend themselves well to being run under a
> >> VM), so I'm afraid there's little that can be done about the problem. It
> >> wouldn't be appropriate to announce test source packages to as wide an
> >> audience as we do for full releases, and obviously the maintainer's own
> >> development platform (and whatever's most widely used among the mailing
> >> list users) will get the best treatment.
> >>
> >> (Not trying to criticize anyone or anything, just trying to make the
> >> point that the "favored" status of one particular OS is more or less
> >> inevitable.)

-- 
H.Merijn Brand  http://tux.nl      Perl Monger  http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using 5.00307 through 5.14 and porting perl5.15.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00,
11.11, 11.23 and 11.31, OpenSuSE 10.1, 11.0 .. 11.4 and AIX 5.2 and 5.3.
http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/           http://www.test-smoke.org/
http://qa.perl.org      http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/