[OT] Another warped idea ?

[Richmond Mathewson]

  On 05/05/2010 21:18, Bob Sneidar wrote:
> May I beg to differ? It really depends on the virtualization software you employ. I use Parallels, and I can assure you, the problems you would normally encounter with any windows installation, you also encounter in Parallels. Of course, this is not a good test for anything that tries to directly access hardware, but barring that, I think certain virtualization environments are perfect for cross platform testing.
>
> Bob
>
>
> On May 5, 2010, at 10:04 AM, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
>
>> When it comes to testing production software, like Rev, virtualization is a
>> snare and a delusion.

Which ever way you cut things virtualization/emulation
(and we do need to include both those options here) is NOT the real thing.
Undoubtedly certain types of virtualization/emulation are better than
others.

But, to a certain extent, it is impossible to test your piece of software on
every operating system operating on every possible piece of hardware that
OS can work on:

While Mac OS can run on a relatively restricted class of machines there 
are still
considerable differences, say, between the G3 'Bondi' (of which we heard 
eariler)
at Mum and Dad's house running 10.3.9 (well 'lurching along' might be a 
better
way of putting things), and the swanky Intel laptops I saw at the Edinburgh
conference.

Windows and Linux both try to be, very nearly, all things to all men 
(well at
least as far as iX86 machines are concerned).

Probably the whole of computing is one socking great delusion and illusion;
but, working on that basis we might as well pack up and go back to our 
abacuses
and slide rules. Mind you, there is a school of thought, with which I 
sometimes
concur, that that is the best thing we could possibly do.

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Having tested (myself) my Devawriter on Mac and Windows XP; having had 
it fairly
extensively tested by chaps who are much better at that sort of thing 
than I am,
it turns out there is a 'nasty' with at least one end-user's Windows 
Vista: whether
it is a RunRev or a Richmond problem has yet to be worked out.

So, 'stealing' a friend's Vista-running laptop over the St George's day 
holiday
(well, oddly appropriate; dueling with the dragon of software testing;
the main problem being that I feel rather like the virgin chained to the 
rock).

However, there are only so many hours in the day, and, inevitably something
is going to get through the 'sieve', and one cannot please all people 
(or all
computers) all the time.

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If you came to my house and saw 4 computers + monitors squeezed into
2 square metres you might admit that virtualization/emulation was not
an entirely bad thing . . .   :)