Re: Quote of the day: "matrix of pain"

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at mindspring dot com>]

On Thu, 12 May 2005, Daniel Kegel wrote:

> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-5657239.html is an
> interview with Ken Klein, CEO of Wind River, about their switch to Linux.
> Here's my favorite bit:
>
> -- snip --
> ZDNet: What are the complexities of Linux in the embedded market?
> Klein: It's very fragmented. In servers, one processor architecture matters.
> In the embedded market, there are about 60 that matter.
> That complexity is what I call the matrix of pain.
> -- snip --
>
> And I thought the matrix at
> http://kegel.com/crosstool/current/buildlogs/ was painful enough,
> with its pitiful 26 architectures :-)

  while we're on the topic, is there any value to reducing the size of
that matrix by letting some combinations subsume others?  consider the
three contiguous columns:

		gcc-3.3.5
	glibc-{2.1.3/2.2.5/2.3.2}
		binutils-2.15
		linux-2.4.26

  so the only difference is in the version of glibc.  note how, as you
go from left to right in terms of newer versions of glibc, you have
more success.  in fact, the success in builds left to right is
monotonically non-decreasing.

  this suggests that it's more time-efficient to concentrate on the
last of those three combinations at the expense of the first two.
IOW, anything glibc-2.1.3 or glibc-2.2.5 can do (in that specific
context), glibc-2.3.2 can do *at least* as well.

  or, at the very least, perhaps some of the older combinations can be
dropped as being, well, *too* old.

  thoughts?

rday



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