[LUNI] What Operating Systems are Developers Using?

[David Rock]

* Richard Lynch <ceo at l-i-e.com> [2010-10-28 21:10]:
> 
> 
> On Thu, October 28, 2010 1:52 pm, David Rock wrote:
> > * Jeff Yamada <slouchfuzz3 at gmail.com> [2010-10-27 16:05]:
> >> http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/10/27/developer-os-preferences/
> >
> > What this fails to take into account is that the appropriate answer is
> > you develop on whatever platform your production environment will be.
> > I
> > have been burned by development on one platform for a system that will
> > ultimately be on a different one, and that ended up causing some real
> > headaches.
> >
> > Regardless of your preferences, _please_ develop in a like
> > environment.
> 
> Your test/QA process should end up happening:
> a) often
> b) on the exact same platform as production
> 
> But there's no real reason to try to mimic *everything* about the
> production environment in your DEV.

No, but you better know which things ARE important.  The most painful
example I ran into was developing PHP on a Mac; using an HFS+, case
insensitive Filesystem (the default), that was ported to a CentOS system
using ext3.  We actually got burned because of a case mismatch that
worked on the Mac side, but failed on the Linux side.  What's worse, it
was jacked up inside of SVN and was a nightmare trying to clean
everything up.  This one was subtle and a real time-waster.  It also
would have been completely avoided, had the developer realized there
were differences between the filesystem characteristics.

As discussed before, there is a distinct difference between development
and testing environments.  My point is that you need to be very aware of
your development environment choices, because they have very real
impacts on how effective your development will be (both good and bad).

You can develop on anything you want, but if you don't understand how
your development environment differs from your production environment,
you are setting yourself up for some real pain, sooner or later.  If you
can develop in an environment that is similar to your production
environment, then all of those variables and caveats are removed.  If
not, just make sure you know what you are getting into.

-- 
David Rock
david at graniteweb.com