[openbeos] Re: PPC versions
- From: "Michael Phipps" <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 07 Apr 2002 23:45:24 -0400
>Philippe Houdoin wrote:
>>> Good is fine. _EXPORT is not good. It is a platform specific thing.
>>
>> This kind of *uglyness* could give us platform/compiler independence.
>> Not really costly.
>
>Yes, exactly! It's really ELF that is weird in this respect, exporting
>every symbol by default, NOT other platforms like PPC. I'm used to seeing
>_EXPORT or something like it in every shared-library-like thing I've ever
>worked on for decades. If adding a few _EXPORTs here and there to the
>source helps PPC people contribute and work on OpenBeOS, I don't see why
>anybody should object.
Very simply, this is adding a requirement to EVERY DEVELOPER out there.
For a *FEATURE* that was never part of the original idea. I am sure that someone
with your level of experience understands how dangerous feature creep is.
That is exactly what PPC has become. I have said to many of the PPC people
(offlist, unfortunately) that PPC is *NOT* a priority or an official port at
this time.
To be honest, it is a little (just a little) out of line to ask every developer
to make
significant changes to their code and build environment in the middle of their
work
to support a side project that some (SMALL) number of people find interesting.
Should I ask everyone to optimize their code for my dual Athelons? Nope.
How about making an Alpha port easy? Nope. Not that these (and 10,000 other
things) are not worthy requests. But you can't please all of the people all of
the time.
>In general, making a codebase work on more than one platform is a good
>thing. It forces you to think about assumptions that would otherwise go
>unchallenged. It might even help shake loose otherwise difficult to find
>bugs, like uninitialized variables that just happen to have the proper
>starting value on one platform but not on another.
I agree, here. But there are a very small number of people with PPCs that can
help.
And the trouble of adding *stuff* to the code to support a 5 year old
compiler/proprietary
file format combination just doesn't seem worthwhile to me.
>You guys seem to be giving Nathan an extraordinarily hard time about this
>awfully trivial thing (and other trivial things), so much so that it would
>seem to me that you are in reality indirectly expressing some other beef you
>have. If that's the case you should say whatever it is you're really
>thinking instead of resorting to this passive/agressive silliness.
This is really out of line. Asking every developer to revisit or update their
code so some
number of people can build on 6 year old machines is trivial and OK? Come on.
I don't want to be a prick about this. I really don't. But this stuff angers me
and is really uncalled for.
If you want to take this up with me off list, please feel free. But this thread
needs to die.
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