Application certification (was Re: [Beowulf] hpl size problems)

[Greg Lindahl]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2005 at 07:01:04PM +0100, John Hearns wrote:

> Gentoo distributes software in tarballs.
> It is recompiled on the host system, and optimised for that system.

Gentoo includes more than just the tarball -- dependency information
is also included somewhere. And I think Gentoo also has RPM.

You're nuts if you think any commercial vendor is going to "support"
it -- there's no way to adequately test on Gentoo, because you don't
know what compiler switches the end-user used, and so there are dozens
of different possibilities. Keep in mind that vendors tend to use
"supported" to mean "We tested it, and think it works. We're willing
to take bugs reported on this distro without replicating them on
another distro."

That being said, in the PathScale case our compilers happen to install
on Gentoo, and we've only had one Gentoo-specific bug reported -- and
that was due to stronger argument checking in a recent version of
glibc. So we were glad to hear about it. We seem to be unusually liberal
in our policies.

-- greg
(employed by, not speaking for, PathScale.)