[
Date Prev][
Date Next][
Thread Prev][
Thread Next][
Date Index][
Thread Index]
[
List Home]
|
[linuxtools-dev] Re: Linux-only features
|
On 04/13/2010 04:39 PM, Andrew Overholt wrote:
* Jeff Johnston<jjohnstn@xxxxxxxxxx> [2010-04-13 16:29]:
Libhover and ChangeLog are OS-independent.
Okay, thanks.
Autotools is a bit trickier. It should work where there the
autotool and sh command exists (the Unix OSes plus Windows when
Cygwin or MingW is set up). Do we want to restrict it and wait for
users to complain? My preference would be documenting as officially
unsupported with a caveat that it should work.
My concern is user expectations. If we just leave it in there for all
OSes, people will assume it's been well-tested on all OSes. I'm
inclined to restrict it to Linux-only for now and request testing on
other operating systems. I'm willing to be swayed in opinion if Jeff or
someone else has strong feelings.
User expectations are not a problem if we document it as untested and
officially unsupported on the other platforms. Our group is called
"Linux Tools" and they have to type it in just to use the update site so
it shouldn't be any surprise to a user that we are concentrated on Linux.
I have already seen a MacOSX user on our forums that is using Autotools
just fine. IMO restricting it lessens our user base for no reason we
can currently think of other than we don't want to receive bug reports
that are non-Linux OS-specific problems. This hasn't happened. We
currently have no Autotools bugs that cannot be reproduced on Linux.
I expect it to just work on all the Unix systems which it seems to do
thus far. For Windows, users of Cygwin and MingW have to do some
fiddling to get the CDT working, let alone our plug-in, but some have
bothered to try. AFAICT, such users accept the additional work as
business-as-usual. We have already received a patch from a MingW user
who was trying to use Autotools.
IMO, the answer is to document it properly and mark any bug as
WORKSFORME or WONTFIX if it cannot be reproduced on Linux thus
eliminating the bug issue. If you restrict the plug-in, you will
disappoint 100% of non-Linux users that wish to use the plug-in or are
currently using it successfully (don't know this exact number). If we
document and close bugs that cannot be reproduced on Linux, I expect we
will get a percentage very close to 0 for that same group of people with
no additional effort on our part.
-- Jeff J.
