On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 12:22:47PM +0200, Gabor Nyeki wrote:
>   I am still wondering.  Is Linux the most portable operating system on
> earth?

That all depends on how you define "portable" and how you define
"operating system"  ;-)

Different versions of Linux have certainly been more widely ported
than NetBSD (as far as we can tell).  But the amount of that work
that gets back into the main Linux distribution seems highly
variable.  Debian, for example, just has 6 different architectures
available for "potato" and 11 for "woody".  AFAIK, that's the
broadest distribution.

Linux-2.4.18 or 2.6whatever are the kernel version numbers.  If
you're looking at kernel.org, that's not the whole story.  Different
architectures have different patch sets.  And some of those
architectures also have sub-sets of different maintained patches.
So do you call the kernel an operating system, and how do you
measure the number of ports?  How portable is it if you have to
modify drivers for different architectures?  How portable is it if
you have to collect patchsets for different architectures?  Does
you answer depend on whether or not those patch sets are conflicting
in some areas?

IMO, Linux is more widely ported, but it's not necessarily more
portable.  There are a lot of people working on it--both for pay
and for fun.

-allen

-- 
 Allen Briggs                     briggs@wasabisystems.com
 Wasabi Systems, Inc.             http://www.wasabisystems.com/