On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Alan McKinnon <[email protected]> wrote: > On 14/03/2013 15:40, Mark David Dumlao wrote: >> On 03/14/2013 09:28 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: >>> Or, try remove LDAP, NIS and PAM support for auth from a RHEL machine to >>> test if it works without those things in place. >>> RHEL? Impossible. >>> Gentoo? Trivially easy. >> "Trivially easy", of course, means an emerge -euDNtv world && emerge >> -ctv && revdep-rebuild -i && revdep-rebuild ... ehehehe >> >> I dunno, it might actually be easier to setup the said distros in a VM. >> And if those configurations don't work, you shouldn't have to support >> them, eh? ;) >> > > > Well, devs tend to ask questions like "would this thing X work in > practice? or do I have to munge my code?" >
No, that doesn't make sense. The situation you presented above was removing "impossible to remove" components on an OS and asking if the software still works. You don't get to call that a vaild test environment if the test environment itself doesn't work in the first place. > They want to know if shipped code supports something. And, I don't get > to say "I'm sorry, I cannot support Centos 4 on this" > > Business has a stock answer "Well, find a way to make it work." Actually, business has a stock answer of "Supported on Windows XP or later, Mac OS X some cat, Red Hat version foo, SuSE...." In general they target actual known platforms, and YES they get to say "I cannot support Centos 4 on this" all the time. > Flexibility is the key. At least with > > "emerge -euDNtv world && emerge -ctv && revdep-rebuild -i && revdep-rebuild" > > I can walk away and come back in three hours, look at logs and tell them > to test. Plus I don't have to re-install their customer code everyt time > from scratch (said code *never*, of course, coming with anything > resembling a MakeFile) > Hoo boy what I would give for -euDNtv to take less than 3 hours on my setup ;)

