On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 01:17:03PM +0100, Carlos E. R. wrote:
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On Wednesday, 2009-12-02 at 21:12 -0600, Rajko M. wrote:
On Wednesday 02 December 2009 19:07:22 Carlos E. R. wrote:
The users of a piece of hardware may have no idea how to fix a driver, they may be just users. People that know how to do that, devs, are probably tech lovers that love current, powerful hardware... so users are left stranded.
The same process works with any software. You can't find XP drivers for hardware that was out with win 98. If you need that hardware you either use win 98, or look for new hardware.
The same is with Linux.
Well... it was written that one of the pro's points of Linux was that it could run on older hardware just fine, where windows couldn't. That is not always true any longer. And yes, this 9 year computer runs about fine, too. Not a proof, really; on some Bugzillas I've been told that my hardware is too old.
And, there are a lot of old computers around. At my workplace we use a P-IV machine with a 9 GB HD and just 255 MiB ram... with XP, not my choice. The other machine was a P-III that died this summer (power supply). Many people are stuck with old machines. Some places they recycle old machines to be sent to poorer countries.
Sure, but this is true only if someone who still owns this hardware and has an intreset in keeping it running keeps it running. If noone is there it simply won't happen. I've got a truckload of old hardware. But having the choice between keeping this stuff running and investing my time to improve the support of new hardware or add a feature that can only run on new hardware but improves the usefulness Linux I'd rather do that. Time is a scarce resource.
Told other way, it is wrong to assume that any user can maintain software by themselves.
Which is what Egbert told us with "oh, well", but the truth is that everybody can learn C to extent that will allow him/her to read the code,
Not true, either. Not everybody is capable of programming in C, even if taught. That they think they can is the root cause of a lot of horrible software around. Me, I learnt C. I earned my potatoes programming once, not so long ago. I programmed in C and other things. And no, I'm not capable of maintaining an existing C Linux project. I know very well the kind of effort it needs...
I agree with your statement. However for contributing small things, look at the code to track down a bug doesn't require very good probramming skills. I'd rather take a patch for a bug that's not idea and rework it than have to track down every single issue myself. A lot of my work involves drivers. There we often encounter problems which we cannot reproduce ourselves. Cheers, Egbert. -- Egbert Eich (Res. & Dev.) SUSE LINUX Products GmbH X Window System Development Tel: +49 911-740 53 0 http://www.suse.de ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org