Livecode server UNIX version (not Linux).

Andre Garzia andre at andregarzia.com
Thu Oct 29 07:31:04 EDT 2020


Hey Friends,

I'm enjoying this thread a lot. I'll not be the person to tell someone not
to port LC to some new ISA or OS, I think it would be great if LC would run
in BSD. Personally, I don't have the time or even the skillset to help
this, but I'd love to benefit from it. Incidentally this is the exact
mindset that prevents good things from happening because many people want
to benefit from something without actually working towards it but I really
can't work on this. The work that LC HQ has done throughout the years
modernizing the codebase and keeping it all working in multiple systems is
amazing and a feat worth of awards but, don't let the convenience of having
that funky download page with all the versions fool you, building LC is not
that easy especially if you're targeting a new ISA/OS combination.

The ideal way in my humble but educated opinion is for LC GPL to be added
to the ports collection of FreeBSD, this is described in the FreeBSD
porters handbook:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/index.html

This is probably not a weekend project and not for the faint of heart. It
will require a lot of work to do this properly, but it can be done.

Before dismissing someone volunteering their own time to work on a FreeBSD
port based on that system's market share remember that Macs used to be a
very small percentage of the market. Under the same rules, LC shouldn't
have focused at all on having it working on Macs, clearly Windows was 90%
of the global marketshare. FreeBSD has a ton of stuff going for it and the
wave of people migrating from Linux towards a BSD experience has been
growing steadily since the encroaching of systemd and other "decisions"
have moved Linux away from a more traditional UNIX experience. Lots of the
shiny things people are doing with Linux have been a part of day to day
life of FreeBSD users much earlier and is usually provided in a more
cohesive experience, such as Jails vs Docker.

I advise people who haven't seen modern FreeBSD workflows to check their
foundation youtube channel, there is a lot of nice in-depth videos there
that might help people see it through new eyes. That being said, I don't
think that LC HQ should dedicate their time to do it, they need to focus on
what produces money regardless of how I or other users here feel about
different operating systems.




On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 at 03:57, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> Pi Digital wrote:
>
>  > Here’s my take (for what it’s worth). Although Unix is used in 71.6%
>  > (source: w3techs.com) of all known websites as of today and Linux only
>  > 29.0%, at least we have ‘a’ distro that works on some server.
>
> That struck me as odd, so I took a moment to see how they derived that
> impressive Unix number (thanks for including the source).
>
> It turns out they're lumping Unix and Linux together under "Unix" - when
> you click "Unix" you get this breakdown:
>
>     Subcategories of Unix
>
>     This diagram shows the percentages of websites using various
>     subcategories of Unix.
>
>     How to read the diagram:
>     Linux is used by 40.5% of all the websites who use Unix
>
>     Websites who use Unix
>     Linux       40.5%
>     BSD         0.5%
>     Darwin     less than 0.1%
>     HP-UX      less than 0.1%
>     Solaris    less than 0.1%
>     Minix      less than 0.1%
>     Unknown    59.0%
>
> I'd wager most of the 59% using "Unknown" are also Linux.
>
> That would line up well enough with what we see at the Wikipedia page
> for server OS market share:
>
>                                Linux   FreeBSD    Unknown  Windows
>     W3Cook         July 2015    96.4%     1.7%       0%      1.9%
>     W3Techs        Feb  2015    35.9%   0.95%       30.9%   32.3%
>     Security Space  Feb 2014   <79.3%     N/A               >20.7%
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Public_servers_on_the_Internet
>
> While Windows has a strong showing in the enterprise for internal
> servers, public-facing servers are by far a Linux story.
>
> This is not only true for most shared and VPS hosting, but public clouds
> as well, with Google, Amazon, and Apple all using Linux to drive their
> infrastructure, and even though Azure is a Win/Linux mix there's a
> surprising amount of Linux going on there (with Ubuntu being the leading
> choice inside containers).
>
> I bring this up not just because I'm a Linux fanboy (though I am and
> make no apologies; I was even worse when I used to be a Mac fanboy <g>),
> but just as a long-winded way to help support your main thesis:
>
> Aside from new architectures like Linux ARM (Raspberry Pi), the most
> commonly-used platforms where LiveCode Serer would be used are well
> supported.
>
> So, as you wrote:
>
>  > Seriously, if anyone was considering doing this, please..., please,
>  > reconsider and put your efforts and talent into fixing what we already
>  > have. It would be far more beneficial to a much greater community
>  > population.
>
> There may be many useful requests in the bug DB worth considering to
> improve the performance, robustness, and feature set of LC Server.
>
> But Heriberto's up for an adventure, one enhancement that would lower
> RAM use and speed things up a bit is this one:
>
> https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=14115
>
> Heriberto, if that's interesting to you let me know. I have a workaround
> in place now, and I'll bet there's a way to move that inside the engine
> for a solution that's much simpler than when we discussed it here on
> this list earlier this year.
>
> --
>   Richard Gaskin
>   Fourth World Systems
>   Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>   ____________________________________________________________________
>   Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
>
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