Re: My thoughts on the "new development model"

William Lee Irwin III
2004-10-28T15:12:30Z

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 at 00:13:44 -0700 William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> I'd expect vastly less than 1%, starting from the arch count, and then
>> making some conservative guesses about drivers. Drivers probably
>> actually take it down to far, far less than 1%.

On Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 09:04:41AM -0400, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
> Sure, but pretty much each installation uses a different 1%.
> If there's a bug in there it's bound to hit someone; that's
> what makes OS writing so difficult. (And that's why "It works
> for me" is not really a useful statement about the overall quality
> of an operating system.)

99.99% of users use one arch, i386.
99.99% of users use one disk driver, IDE.
The intersection of these users is probably well over 99.999% of all
users.

Then probably a small list of secondary drivers varies. Statistically,
users with anything but the crappiest x86 s**tboxen and a tiny subset
of all drivers (arjan's 20) are hopelessly outnumbered.

-- wli