🚀 go-pugleaf

>Don't take my word for it, look at recent history.  Three years ago a
>Sun4 was just a wet dream.  Now SPARC is Sun's flagship architecture.
>If porting software was that serious a problem we'd know it.  Ditto for
>MIPS, ibm RT, Moto 88K, etc, of course.  Granted, the key to all this
>is coding applications in a high level language and for a portable OS.

Yes, it's true that machines have been ported to in big ways,
particularly machines which run Unix.

But that doesn't mean it's easy and there's little resistance out
there.

I'm doing a major port right now of a major piece of software (mpofs)
just about everyone on this list has heard of. I've also ported some
major hunks of university-ware that were non-trivial, like GNU Emacs,
Franz Lisp, Macsyma, KCL, TeX, etc.

The QA tests alone (on the mpofs) have taken weeks and have turned up
numerous little problems which are being fixed. Sure, just recompile,
sure, it even *seems* to work, until someone bothers to notice that
the floating point unit is a little different or some such thing, hey,
it runs w/o a peep, even gives answers, who cares whether or not
they're the same as you get on the other machines in the room.

Customers are such nitpickers!

There's a term in this business (this business being "software")
called "code spreading". It is used to describe the result of putting
your code onto more than one machine and maintaining the differences.
It is a term which makes major software vendors quake, it's the dark
side of portability.

Sure, it's not all that much work to make things go on another
relatively compatible platform. And I'm sure your customer service
folks will pick up the little differences in system error messages,
directory hierarchies, behavior on bootstrap and recovery mechanisms
available, reliability quirks, floating point units, slight version
differences in libraries, to socket or not to socket, etc etc in no
time at all. And the customers can't expect to have these quirks of
installation and operation in the manuals you ship, and besides, the
printers will re-print all those manuals for free for you, it's just a
"few leetle changes". And it's fortunate that the telepathic networks
are in place so you merely have to finish the port and mentally think
it out loud and every customer on the new platform will know about
your product and begin ringing your phones! Won't cost a nickel.

Let's leave it at: It's quite possible to have your software running
on many different platforms, and it can even be very profitable. It's
nice that this possibility is a thousand times more open than it was a
decade ago.

But it's not just a matter of getting someone to type "make install"
on the new platform. Itt does take a good lump of cash and a lot of
work to accomplish if your product is worth anything at all.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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