Comment by curt15

3 years ago

>The first approach is a lot of work, and suffers from breakages from time to time

Are there any distros that treat their public APIs as an unbreakable contract with developers like what MS does?

12 comments

curt15

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salmo  3 years ago

RedHat claims or at least claimed that for EL. I think it’s limited to within minor releases though, with majors being API.

That’s fine if you’re OK relying on their packages and 3rd party “enterprise” software that’s “certified” for the release. No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.

The most annoying to me was that RHEL6 was still under support and had an ancient kernel that excluded running Go, GRaalVM, etc. static binaries. No epoll() IIRC.

Often times you find yourself having to pull more and more libraries into a build. It all starts with wanting a current Python and before you know it you’re bringing in your own OpenSSL.

And they have no problem changing their system management software in patch releases. They’ve changed priority of config files too many times. But that’s another rant for another day.

This is a place where I wish some BSD won out. With all the chunks of the base userspace + kernel each moving in their own direction it’s impossible to get out of this place. Then add in every permutation of those pieces from the distros.

Multiple kernel versions * multiple libc implementations * multiple inits * …

I’d never try to make binary-only software for Linux. Dealing with packaging OSS is bad enough.

  • yellowapple  3 years ago

    > No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.

    glances nervously at my corporate-issued ThinkPad running RHEL 8

  • twic  3 years ago

    > No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.

    I worked somewhere where we ran CentOS on the desktop. That seemed to work pretty well. I don't see why RHEL would be any worse, apart from being more expensive.

    • _muff1nman_  3 years ago

      I ran CentOS on the desktop for many years. It was a very nice, solid setup that I could rely on updating without sweating about an upgrade breaking something. I've recently switched to fedora in light of recent CentOS 8 shenanigans but CentOS 7 was wonderful at the time.

      3 replies →

  • bandrami  3 years ago

    > No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.

    Err.... yes we do? It's a development base I know isn't going to change for a long time, and I can always flatpak whatever applications I need. Hell, now that RHEL 9 includes pipewire I put it on my DAW/DJ laptop.

dfabulich  3 years ago

No, no one does. It's a lot more work to maintain all public APIs and their behavior for all time; it can often prevent even fixing bugs, if some apps come to depend on the buggy behavior. Microsoft would occasionally add API parameters/ options to let clients opt-in to bug fixes, or auto-detect known-popular apps and apply special bug-fix behaviors just for them.

Even Apple doesn't make that level of "unbreakable contract" commitment. Apple will announce deprecations of APIs with two or three years of opportunity to fix them. If apps don't upgrade within the timeframe, they just stop working in newer versions of macOS.

  • eschaton  3 years ago

    Most Apple-deprecated API stick around rather than “just stop working in newer versions of macOS.” Binary compatibility is very well-maintained over the long term.