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You've never seen anyone complain about shoddy windows drivers, dll hell, legacy support or browser quirks? You've somehow missed so much as the kvetching abou
by roc 13y ago
You've never seen anyone complain about shoddy windows drivers, dll hell, legacy support or browser quirks? You've somehow missed so much as the kvetching about Microsoft not updating older browsers, instead tying finally-better versions of IE to new operating systems, leaving a long-tail of abandoned devices out there that take serious development effort to deal with and thereby hold back advances?
You've never seen people griping in unix land about the different opinions the different versions of different distros have, about where various files belong? or how/which configuration defaults should be set? Or how packages support a small handful of environments and rely on individual admins or community maintenance to discover and document how in the world to get package W to play well with package X on distro Y.Z?
What's the push for containers even about, if no-one's running into fragmentation-style roadblocks?
- FooBarWidget 13y agoSure, but what's that got to do with hardware fragmentation? All those problems were caused by Windows itself and the lack of updates and solutions, not because Windows ran on tons of different hardware. As for complaining about different distros: that depends. For some time I've tried to solve that problem through a project of mine, Autopackage (now defunct, website gone; it's still on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopackage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopackage). But we met a lot of resistance from distribution people and even from users. The view was that each distro is its own operating system and shouldn't bother with compatibility with other distros. Heck binary distribution is only for closed source software, was what they said. In the end there was not enough support. So no, I've not seen people complaining quite as much about Linux distro fragmentation as about Android fragmentation.
- roc 13y agoWindows legacy problems were very often, very much a case of Windows running on a ton of different hardware. Drivers have quite a bit to do with the pains of hardware fragmentation. And quite a bit of the legacy pain is in having to deal with the old (flawed/bugged/limited) abstraction layers and dlls that people would very much rather not have to support anymore, but cannot abandon due the installed base of the old hardware it supports. As to quantity of complaints: you asserted these sorts of complaints just didn't exist. If you want to argue about whether they're overblown, or simply proportional with the fragmentation gripes of various historical platforms, that's quite a bit different.
- bluedino 13y ago> And quite a bit of the legacy pain is in having to deal with the old (flawed/bugged/limited) abstraction layers and dlls that people would very much rather not have to support anymore, but cannot abandon due the installed base of the old hardware it supports. It'd be interesting to see if the newer versions of Android would attempt to do what the newer versions of Windows did - detect an older application trying to use an undocumented feature, and then give the app what it wants to hear, instead of crashing or having a bug. Therefore, keeping compatibility with older programs. Microsoft of course had teams of people doing this kind of stuff.
- randallu 13y agoThere are a bunch of conditionals in the Android framework on which SDK version something was compiled against, so they already do this in a way.