Target OS list? (Was: RE: The libevent issue (Was: Re: checking in))

[Daniel Poirot]

I just wasted the afternoon trying to coerce Outlook into bottom-posting.

What are folks using for am MUA? I am a grey-beard but not enough of one to
use emacs for mail...


Speaking of the grey around the muzzle, after 15 years at NASA, I am in my
second decade of selling and supporting commercial software development
tools into the Linux market. 

All of Linux that matters can be divided into two parts - Red Hat-based
(CentOS, Fedora) and Debian-based (Ubuntu). Capture them and the rest
follow.

The *BSD's are strong in the enterprise server and Internet backbone.
OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD are like the axis of Cartesian-space - common
origin but orthogonal in every way that matters! 

I would expect a favorable reception in the Solaris camp but there is little
else in the vendor UNIX world still around. The giants - Irix, Ultrix, HP-UX
and AIX - are all but gone.


The testing effort is highly important. Once a full test suite is in place,
Linux distros can be knocked out several per day!


I am very comfortable answering questions in the VM area. My desktop has 16
cores and 72 GB RAM. There are usually several VMs running! One can stand up
a minimal system in just a few minutes. I generally use type-2 hypervisors
like VirtualBox or VMWare rather than the bare metal type.


The wild card in the quest for robust, secure time service may very well be
Android! Mac OS seems well represented already and nobody wants to be
bothered by Windows just yet...

Is DistroWatch still the best measure of the market?

- dan


-----Original Message-----
From: Hal Murray [mailto:hmurray at megapathdsl.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2015 5:16 PM
To: Daniel Poirot
Cc: devel at ntpsec.org; hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Subject: Re: Target OS list? (Was: RE: The libevent issue (Was: Re: checking
in))


dtpoirot at gmail.com said:
> Is there a candidate list of OSes to be targeted?

For Linux, OS isn't good enough.  You also have to specify the distro.  I
think I've seen something similar for one of the *BSDs, but I forget the
details.

For all OSes/distros, you also need to specify the version.  Most
OSes/distros support 2 versions, or 2.5 depending on how you count.  There
is normally something like:
  The current released version
  The previous released version
  The in-progress next version.

There is often a bit of overlap for a short while after a new version is
released.  For example, on Fedora 3 versions are normally supported for a
month or so before support for the now old-old version gets dropped.


> You can put just about anything on a VM these days!  ;-)

I'm not familiar with running VMs.  Is xen on Linux/Fedora reasonably easy
to setup and learn?  (and reasonably solit)  Can I boot from any handy CD?
Or do things work a lot better if the guest kernal knows it will be running
on VM?



--
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.