[Beowulf] Redmond is at it, again

[Greg Lindahl]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 09:24:19AM +0100, Andrew Cater wrote:

> Since the core of most distributions is essentially the same, surely the
> cluster software vendors can build for e.g. Linux Standard Base
> compatibility at a minimum / supply a tarball with Automake/Autoconf and
> Leave cluster users to actually make good use of their software.

Andy,

That's what I thought back when I was a customer, but now that I work
for a cluster software vendor, it isn't so simple. It's not a matter
of where the files live, which the LSB takes care of nicely. It's the
bugs and weirdnesses and unique things that mean that we can't proudly
say we support something without having tested it extensively... or
we'll get egg on our faces.

> Software support should be "Your widget crashed when I fed it 64k length
> records - help me! Sure" not "which kernel/glibc are you running? _Now_
> I'll help you" :)

... until the day that it actually is a kernel or glibc bug. "Oh, we
don't really support that OS, you have to upgrade to something
different." "I'm sorry, but that distro has a broken binutils, so
programs with large common blocks simply can't be compiled, and we
aren't going to even think about doing a workaround because not enough
of our users use that distro." And it goes downhill from there.

-- greg