Re: Caldera Network Desktop (was:Re: SMP & threads for SQL queries)

In article <511867$hdj_at_news.cs.tu-berlin.de>, Jost Boekemeier <jost_at_hercules.rz.charite.hu-berlin.de> wrote:

| Yes, every new software has bugs, but it is fair to say that Linux
| is much more stable than other software due to its special devellopment
| procedure, where *everyone* can look into the code and report bugs so that
| these bugs will be fixed immediatly.

This is utter nonsense! Linux has many good features, but QA is not one of them, and even reported bugs go unfixed. One recent example of this is the scheduler error in 2.0.15, caused because there's no testing mechanism in place and a change was put in the "stable" version instead of the 2.1.0 development version.

A while ago there was a problem which cause filesystem corruption when running SMP. This was not a "some people might hit it" bug, but a solid error. The bug was reported and a fix submitted. Not only was the fix not put in, but no one bothered to put a one line comment "no SMP this version" in the Makefile, so people who didn't subscribe to the SMP list downloaded each new version and lost their files.

Linux does not has much concern for backward compatibility, as witness curses support taken out of the library because someone thought ncurses was better. It is, but if you have a program which uses curses, freeBSD, AIX, SCO, etc, all still support curses.

Linux is a great and wonderful operating system, but it does not have the things which a vendor concerned with profit would provide. If no one decides to do something, it goes undone, because it's not someone's job to worry about installed customer base. Let's all praise Linux for what it is, let's not get carried away with enthusiasm, if Linux was a stable and bug free as you say it wouldn't be an adventure.

--
	-bill davidsen (davidsen_at_tmr.com)
"As a software development model, Anarchy does not scale well."
		-Dave Welch