RFC: Which platforms does Parrot support?

Andrew Whitworth wknight8111 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 20 17:51:23 UTC 2011


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
<jonathan at leto.net> 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 <jonathan at leto.net>
> 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
>


More information about the parrot-dev mailing list