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AppChecker Survey Results

AppChecker Survey Results. Brian Proffitt. Survey Says. 14 Questions, Interesting Answers Questions were designed to find out general satisfaction with AppChecker, as well as current use practices All respondents left name/user information, so we can follow up. Highlights of the Survey.

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AppChecker Survey Results

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  1. AppChecker Survey Results Brian Proffitt

  2. Survey Says... 14 Questions, Interesting Answers Questions were designed to find out general satisfaction with AppChecker, as well as current use practices All respondents left name/user information, so we can follow up

  3. Highlights of the Survey 538 Downloads of AppChecker Coders from Adobe, HP, Australian Dept. of Defence, Oracle, Zmanda, Kaspersky Labs, Toshiba, Intel, NEC, Novell, and Cray Many independent developers and smaller ISVs Survey Results 53 Survey responders Highlights Over 40% of respondents plan to support their app on 5+ distros RHEL was most used distro, followed by openSUSE and Ubuntu 60% of users want to use AppChecker for existing apps

  4. Question:How many Linux distributions do you currently/plan to support for your application? • Only 12.5% of respondents support just one distro • Over one-third use 6+ distributions

  5. Question:Which distributions do you currently/plan to support? • RHEL is most popular, unsurprisingly • SLES not as widely used, openSUSE slightly more • “Other” answers: Gentoo, FreeBSD, Slackware, Archlinux

  6. Question:Why did you download and install AppChecker? • Application portability is by far the most desired goal

  7. Question:Was the application you tested with AppChecker a new application or something that has been in production for some time? • We should definitely stress the use of this for existing applications (short-term)‏ • We should also look for ways to market/improve AppChecker and the LSB for developers making new apps. • New LSB tools should help change this

  8. Question:What is your greatest pain point in supporting the Linux platform? • Multiple distros is the biggest pain point • Pace of change seems to be another problem

  9. Question:Having used AppChecker would you rate the experience as...

  10. Question:AppChecker was helpful in helping you target multiple versions of the same distribution. • High scores: Easy to use/install; helpful in supporting multiple distros • Low scores: Cross-version support, planning on LSB certification

  11. Question:If you don't plan on certifying to the LSB, why?

  12. Question:What changes, if any, did you make to your application as a result of using AppChecker. Please enter “None” if you made no changes. • Some changes were applied, along the library level

  13. Question:What, if any, key symbols and/or libraries are missing that you need to make your application portable?

  14. Question:What additional help do you need to write applications for the Linux platform?

  15. Additional Quotes from Respondents (From Tizor): I consider myself a "lightweight" user of LSB. Tizor markets a passive network-based monitoring appliance, but under some circumstances customers require a remote agent to run on their servers and act as a probe. We developed an agent to run on multiple platforms. I stumbled on LSB when researching the compatibility of various Linux distributions. I found the AppChecker very useful to measure portability, and made a few code changes as a result. We also made changes to the way the agent is started at boot time based on the recommendations in the LSB. As a result, we currently have just one installation RPM for all supported versions of Linux. However, the agent is not 100% LSB conformant. It uses bash scripts to install and startup, and relies on the standard ld-linux loader rather than ld-lsb. (What is the benefit of ld-lsb? And what happens if a Linux variant does not support it?)‏

  16. Additional Quotes from Respondents (fromETM professional control GmbH, a Siemens Company): I'm watching LSB's progress already since some years and for me it seems that much too few distributions and companies use the certification process. As you see the company I work for has the same "problem", e.g., our product is not certified yet. You may ask why? The reason I see is that our main market is still Windows (which is a shame) and I'm more or less the only one in our company pushing Linux. Still, our product is offered and sold on Linux as well and as we need to test and support the software we'd like to have as few as possible different platforms. So LSB would be a solution here, but e.g. our current version is officially supported on RHEL5 and openSuse 11.0--and you see that openSuse 11.0 is still not LSB certified. So whenever I try to find a LSB version which matches our target platforms I fail. Also our product uses some libraries which are not LSB certified, but which are from a different vendor, e.g. the MySQL client library, the Oracle client library, libusb, etc. At least I find it a very good step that the LF provides the AppChecker tool so that at least we can make sure our product would theoretically run on different platforms as well, even though we are not LSB certified.

  17. Additional Quotes from Respondents (from OneSpin Solutions GmbH): The portability checking tool helped us greatly to find out that our product runs smoothly on all our supported distributions and other distributions without the hassle of having to install all the distributions.

  18. The Linux Foundation Confidential Points for Discussion The majority of app checker users do not want to certify, saying it makes no sense for them to do so Yet the vast majority sees real value in the AppChecker tool How do we quantify this value without certification? AppChecker is used on existing – not new – applications, and thus has limited effect How do we get the database manager and other LSB tools in the build process for new apps? Will the new LSB tools improve this?

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