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Ask HN: Do devs on your team all use the same OS for development?

2 pointsby hckr1292about 10 years ago
Follow up question for bonus points -- how much time does your team spend resolving issues related to differing development environments?

1 comment

shubbabout 10 years ago
Big company. We use a mixture of Linux and Windows. Working in C++, this is tricky, our product is cross platform, so it guarantees someone is trying it out on both OSs, and with different compilers (we autobuild gcc, clang, MS).<p>Stuff that&#x27;s ugly -<p>* Cross platform testing - we run unit and system tests on both platforms, and use a custom tool to run the builds and generate reports. Maybe this could look a lot nicer with Jenkins and virtual machines, but what we have now is two servers and a mess of bailing wire. I&#x27;ve found tools like Chef don&#x27;t work that well on windows but I might just be doing it wrong.<p>* Our best programmer likes to work under Linux. When he adds important platform stuff like new libraries, he often &#x27;forgets&#x27; to test it on Windows and we don&#x27;t find out till the master branch&#x27;s tests fail.<p>* Because people are using different editors, sometimes the code autoformatting is different. That creates a lot of noise from perfectionist types at code review time, although I think that more shows we need to improve code reviews.<p>* IT keep breaking the windows environment by making the computers more secure<p>As for how we resolve issues - we have setting up a development environment, doing a full build, and running the tests fully scripted. The build&#x2F;test system lets us know when something doesn&#x27;t work on a particular platform pretty quickly. The team has a culture of visibly shaming people who create a platform issue (there is a trophy for the last person to cause a test to fail in the master branch as we should be running them locally) and then automatically cross platform on a branch. I don&#x27;t agree with it)