Re: barbut anyone?

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 9:07 PM, Clark Mills <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> Vendors have been using that excuse with CentOS forever but generally we
> can make things work and if it's important enough then getting a RHEL
> license isn't too much.
>

Not wishing to appear to justify arbitrary refusal to honour guarantees but
I see this from the other side in my day job.

My employers certify their product to work in certain environments
(Operating system incl version numbers / Database incl versions / minimum
CPU power / minimum memory size / minimum disk size). For each of those
environments we maintain virtual machine(s) and pay someone to ensure that
the product tests have run correctly before making a release and where
necessary a developer has made the necessary changes. There is a real cost
involved in this testing.

Customers do sometimes ignore our advise about supported versions and if we
can't reproduce the problem on a version we know about we have big problems
... do we add the version to our list of supported versions, incurring the
cost of ongoing testing, do we establish and then discard a development
environment for a "one off" fix or do we dig our heels in and risk losing
that customer? This is a commercial decision each time & I'm glad I'm not
the one who makes it.


> PS: Surely if it's just a superset, it's simple enough to strip out the
> extras?
>
>
Sounds good, unfortunately you do sometimes get unexpected breakages on
apparently trivial version changes.

At a previous job I saw an in-house developed system that worked just dandy
on one version of database server software break on a minor patch level
change ... the system had errors in the parameters it passed to the
database software but this was masked by a fault in the older version of
the database server ...


-- 
Bruce Clement

Home:    http://www.clement.co.nz/
Twitter:    http://twitter.com/Bruce_Clement
Directory: http://www.searchme.co.nz/

"Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good
appreciation of everything that already exists in this field." Mikhail
Kalashnikov
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