5 ms·

Wow, I wouldn't have thought that folks would be sloppy about case, but I guess it makes sense if all one's used to is a case-insensitive system. > Same policy

by wtbob 11y ago

Wow, I wouldn't have thought that folks would be sloppy about case, but I guess it makes sense if all one's used to is a case-insensitive system. > Same policy as with our runtime; in order to keep our own sanity, we will officially support Ubuntu Linux. … > Installer will (most likely – it’s one of the things we didn’t do yet) just be a .deb package. I really wish folks would support Debian first, and let Ubuntu support flow from that.

jebblue 11y ago
I agree in both cases. There would be no Ubuntu today without Debian (although I've never installed it because I tried years ago and found it to be too difficult which is why I went with Ubuntu after becoming less than enchanted with RedHat) and really I thought case issues were a thing of the 90's, early 2000's at the latest. I've read that Debian has gotten easier to install though but I'm not sure from their web site which one. They need to get someone with a marketing background to help them with their web site.
- natosha_bard 11y ago
  I can totally sympathize, and we'd like to support every distribution. :-( But the simple statistics show that we get the most bang for our buck by supporting Ubuntu because of its desktop market share. The great thing about the Linux community is that it's full if crazy smart people who will go out of their way to make sure stuff is working on their distribution. And of course if something isn't working on your distro, it'll be just like the player -- send us a bug report or poke us on the forums, and we'll do what we can. But in order to not spread our resources too thin (especially considering that this is starting off as an experiment), we have to set some boundaries, and we need to do what will make sense for the largest number of users. And case sensitivity problems will exist as long as we have a mixture of some platforms (Windows/OS X) using case-insensitive filesystems by default, and others (Linux) using case-sensitive filesystems by default.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Even worse, on Mac OSX some people use case-sensitive file systems. So you’d have to support it anyway.
    - tormeh 11y ago
      No, the only sane way is if only the standard OSX config is supported. You can't do all kinds of weird things with your system and still expect it to be supported. As a developer, you want to support as few types of systems as possible, because that's easier and a tiny number of types comprise the great majority of systems. The extreme variant of this is of course console exclusivity.
      - astrange 11y ago
        iOS uses a case-sensitive file system, so that's one reason to keep it working if you already support the other OS in the family.
  - jebblue 11y ago
    I wanted to play around with Unity several times so if I get to do that it would be fun, thanks to you and your company for looking at making it a reality.
  - seba_dos1 11y ago
    I think the point that grandparent was trying to make is that with Debian support, Ubuntu support comes almost for free, and you get other Debian descendants included as well. It broadens your set of officially supported users quite a lot for a cost comparable to adding support for a new Ubuntu release. While generally it's also true the other way around (if something is made for Ubuntu, it's likely it will work on Debian without big issues), it would be nice for companies to recognize Ubuntu's roots and make the support official. Of course in practice the community will quickly report back to you something like "hey, change your dependency to include libjpeg-turbo8 or libturbojpeg0, in Debian there's no libjpeg-turbo8" (real example from early Steam package), however, maybe it's just me, but when I see something having official support for Ubuntu only it sounds like "we were too lazy to give it a try on other distros", while explicitly stating support for Debian-based distributions starts sounding much more professional :)
danudey 11y ago
If they already have a build system set up, it's probably exceedingly trivial to build .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu, if such a thing is even required. That said, the reason why they support Ubuntu is that it provides static targets. 12.04 will be supported until late 2017, which means that they users two years from now can install a .deb built today. Likewise, supporting 14.04 means .deb packages will work until late 2019. Especially for companies that want to develop on Linux, there's a huge benefit in first-party support from your vendor for the next four years.
pgeorgi 11y ago
case sensitivity is a classic when porting C/C++ codebases from Windows (I did my fair share). It starts with #include "whyShouldiCAReFoRSENSITivity.h", but for file I/O heavy those are the simple ones...

by wtbob 11y ago

jebblue 11y ago

I agree in both cases. There would be no Ubuntu today without Debian (although I've never installed it because I tried years ago and found it to be too difficult which is why I went with Ubuntu after becoming less than enchanted with RedHat) and really I thought case issues were a thing of the 90's, early 2000's at the latest. I've read that Debian has gotten easier to install though but I'm not sure from their web site which one. They need to get someone with a marketing background to help them with their web site.

natosha_bard 11y ago
I can totally sympathize, and we'd like to support every distribution. :-( But the simple statistics show that we get the most bang for our buck by supporting Ubuntu because of its desktop market share. The great thing about the Linux community is that it's full if crazy smart people who will go out of their way to make sure stuff is working on their distribution. And of course if something isn't working on your distro, it'll be just like the player -- send us a bug report or poke us on the forums, and we'll do what we can. But in order to not spread our resources too thin (especially considering that this is starting off as an experiment), we have to set some boundaries, and we need to do what will make sense for the largest number of users. And case sensitivity problems will exist as long as we have a mixture of some platforms (Windows/OS X) using case-insensitive filesystems by default, and others (Linux) using case-sensitive filesystems by default.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Even worse, on Mac OSX some people use case-sensitive file systems. So you’d have to support it anyway.
  - tormeh 11y ago
    No, the only sane way is if only the standard OSX config is supported. You can't do all kinds of weird things with your system and still expect it to be supported. As a developer, you want to support as few types of systems as possible, because that's easier and a tiny number of types comprise the great majority of systems. The extreme variant of this is of course console exclusivity.
    - astrange 11y ago
      iOS uses a case-sensitive file system, so that's one reason to keep it working if you already support the other OS in the family.
- jebblue 11y ago
  I wanted to play around with Unity several times so if I get to do that it would be fun, thanks to you and your company for looking at making it a reality.
- seba_dos1 11y ago
  I think the point that grandparent was trying to make is that with Debian support, Ubuntu support comes almost for free, and you get other Debian descendants included as well. It broadens your set of officially supported users quite a lot for a cost comparable to adding support for a new Ubuntu release. While generally it's also true the other way around (if something is made for Ubuntu, it's likely it will work on Debian without big issues), it would be nice for companies to recognize Ubuntu's roots and make the support official. Of course in practice the community will quickly report back to you something like "hey, change your dependency to include libjpeg-turbo8 or libturbojpeg0, in Debian there's no libjpeg-turbo8" (real example from early Steam package), however, maybe it's just me, but when I see something having official support for Ubuntu only it sounds like "we were too lazy to give it a try on other distros", while explicitly stating support for Debian-based distributions starts sounding much more professional :)

danudey 11y ago

If they already have a build system set up, it's probably exceedingly trivial to build .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu, if such a thing is even required. That said, the reason why they support Ubuntu is that it provides static targets. 12.04 will be supported until late 2017, which means that they users two years from now can install a .deb built today. Likewise, supporting 14.04 means .deb packages will work until late 2019. Especially for companies that want to develop on Linux, there's a huge benefit in first-party support from your vendor for the next four years.

pgeorgi 11y ago

case sensitivity is a classic when porting C/C++ codebases from Windows (I did my fair share). It starts with #include "whyShouldiCAReFoRSENSITivity.h", but for file I/O heavy those are the simple ones...