Re: Aunt Tillie builds a kernel (was Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution)

Larry McVoy
2002-01-14T18:57:05Z

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 07:38:24PM +0100, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 12:52:28PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > She complains of occasional lockups, and that she gets skips when
> > playing her Guy Lombardo MP3s. Melvin says, over the phone: "Yup,
> > that version had some VM problems. And you need the low-latency stuff
> > that went in three releases ago.
>
> ... and the 200 patches that the vendor added that she's become
> so used to just being there...

Yeah, what Dave said. Eric, your approach is pushing Aunt Tillie towards
more variations and what the Aunt Tillie needs is less. Ditto for the
distro vendors. They want as few as possible different kernels running
out there, the more variations there the greater the support load. It's
the *opposite* of what the Linux kernel community wants, they want the
broadest coverage of combinations they can get, that shows up more bugs.
If a distro vendor could get away with exactly one kernel config, they
would. Even if it made for a 20MB kernel image, the support tradeoff
is a win.

Supporting products for Aunt Tillie is very different than supporting
products for a bunch of hackers. One wants "it works" and the other
wants "the source".
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm