On 1 February 2010 19:46, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 1:28 PM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> That said, there must be *someone* on this list
bloody-minded enough
> to test Wikipedia in every possible browser and file bugs and patches
> accordingly ...
It shouldn't be a question of bloddy-mindedness.
The rotting of
support for a single browser version would potential shut out many
tens of thousands of users. It's something worth dedicating some
resources to.
I didn't mean "bloody-minded" as a bad thing - I'm presently compiling
Xorg from source on various virtualised OSes just for the fun of it
and noting that no-one at all could have done a complete Xorg compile
in the last year or they would have noticed all the breakages ...
I do think that a horribly under-resourced open source project (most
of them) can reasonably say "OK, if people want xxx supported, please
step forward" and, a year later, saying "OK, zero people came forward
to fix xxx, out it goes." It's a pretty powerful and conclusive
argument.
Simply verifying functionality with all the *popular*
browsers and
platforms is already burdensome. Doing it well (and consistently)
requires some infrastructure, such as a collection of virtualized
client machines. Once that kind of infrastructure is in place and well
oiled the marginal cost of adding a few more test cases should not be
especially great.
This sort of automated test harness must have been built already many
times for other sites.
Presumably someone with MacOS X 10.4 PowerPC can run IE-Mac in Classic
for the sake of this. Anyone? Anyone? That is the necessary condition
to solve the problem presented by this thread, and also the sufficient
one.
- d.