Timothy Murphy wrote on Tuesday 31 July 2007: > >> If a developer makes a change which prevents the software working > >> with some hardware it previously worked with, > >> I think the onus is on the developer to warn the user of this. > > How would they know that it doesn't work on hardware that they don't > > have? > If someone makes a change in the way software operates, > he should consider (in my view) if there is any hardware > on which this might not work. > It is not actually necessary to have the hardware > in order to work this out. I don't know whether you are involved in software development of any kind but your statement suggests that you are not. It is beyond any question that a developer SHOULD consider if there is any hardware which might be affected by a change. But we are not living in a perfect world. People make mistakes and the complexity of a software makes it impossible to consider every side effect of a change - at least not at justifiable costs. There are formal methods to prove software correct - but even those are only applicable under very precise conditions. Even Donald E. Knuth said: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." Any test on software can only prove there are some bugs, but not that a software is bug-free under any circumstances. > 2. The actual question was about a change > between Fedora kernels 2.6.22.1-27 and 2.6.22.1-33. > In other words, "improvements" to the same Linux kernel. I would call it "changes". Not every change is a improvement - obviously. :) That the finest thing about Linux - if you do not like the changes, you can stick to the old kernel. > In my experience, Fedora is very little different to Ubuntu > or other distributions in this sense. > And Fedora software does not seem to me any more or less likely > to work than Redhat software. I cannot agree. We used RHEL and Fedora - RHEL (and CentOS) for the servers and Fedora for workstations. There are many differences, even if the administration is very simmilar. RHEL comes with older software which has been in use for longer time. And the kernels are rather old. RHEL had kernel 2.4 for a long time, Debian stable even kernel 2.2. At this time kernel 2.6 was already declared stable and had been integrated into Fedora. New kernels have better support for new hardware, but older are better tested. That is what is important for an admin. -- bye, Adalbert CPU needs recalibration
