I agree pretty strongly that we need to be more clear about what we do and do not support. It would also help to describe what "support" means. We call Windows a supported platform right now, but if a windows user came to us with a real technical problem, our response would probably be described as "sluggish", "uninformed", "unhelpful", "incapable", and "bumbling". We "support" windows in the sense that we don't like to ship a release if there are tests failing on that platform, but we can't offer meaningful and timely technical support when problems arise. It's not just a matter of having more smoke reports flowing in from windows machines, it's a matter of having developers with real platform experience and expertise, and we are severely lacking in that department.
Of course, as people keep mentioning, windows is where the majority of users are. It would be extremely foolish of us to say that Windows does not matter. We want to keep Parrot working on windows, and we want to keep the tests passing, but I don't think we are capable of anything beyond that. We need to define what "support" means. Does it mean we won't ship a release with obviously broken tests? And where tests do fail on windows, do we skip them, say something about different platform capabilities, and wave our hands at it? We haven't had a situation yet where a user has a bug in a prior release and asks us to provide a patch for it, but is that a service that we would even offer? If so, how far back in the catalog of supported releases would we be willing to try it for? And what does it mean with the "dominant compiler" bit? I would suggest we have more windows hackers using Strawberry Perl + MinGW than we have using MSVC. Do we support both? Do we only mark one "supported" when the other may be more "supportable"? Duke raises a great point with regards to BSD variants: We have much more support capability and a better track record of test success on various flavors of BSD than we have on Windows. At what point do we say that "We can support BSD", or "We *will* support it"? There is one environment that we know we can offer speedy, helpful support: "Recent" Linux in mainstream distros with the normal accompaniment of tools (perl, binutils, coreutils, gcc, etc) and an intel processor. Everything else falls short by degrees. It would be very nice to spell out exactly what platforms we claim to support, and exactly what we mean when we make the promise. --Andrew Whitworth On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Jonathan "Duke" Leto <[email protected]> wrote: > Howdy, > > From > https://github.com/parrot/parrot/blob/master/docs/project/support_policy.pod > : > > We support recent versions of the three major operating system families: > GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. Any version less than two years > old counts as "recent". > > We support the most recent version of the dominant compiler which conforms > to the C89 standard on each supported platform. > > I find this sorely lacking in details. > > For instance, we have a lot of code that tries to support Solaris, yet it is > not listed as one of our supported platforms. Do we support Solaris? On what > architectures? > > A new OS X release just came out. Has anybody tested it? And more importantly, > who wants to spend part of their finite time on this Earth supporting it? Not > me. > > The "windows" platform actually means 17 different environments, with > different > APIs, assumptions, compilers and whatnot. Which flavors of Windows do we > *actually support* ? Our support document says we only care about compilers > that implement C89. Is that really true? > > We have dedicated GCC compile farm smokers on NetBSD and FreeBSD currently. > Why > are those platforms not "supported" ? > > What about mobile platforms? > > Duke > > -- > Jonathan "Duke" Leto <[email protected]> > Leto Labs LLC > 209.691.DUKE // http://labs.leto.net > NOTE: Personal email is only checked twice a day at 10am/2pm PST, > please call/text for time-sensitive matters. > _______________________________________________ > http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev > _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
