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A developer’s review of Red Hat’s Embedded Linux Developer Suite (Part 4)

Nov 27, 1997 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — views

Overall assessment

I'm not sure what to make of Red Hat's strategy in releasing the Embedded Linux Developer Suite at this time. It has an unfinished feel, obvious to even the most casual user. The user interface reminds me of some quick-and-dirty GUIs I've written myself to meet temporary internal needs, rather than a professional user interface intended for customers. Some might consider this acceptable if the process were well documented, so at least users could understand the work flow and devise a strategy to solve their application needs. But the documentation is curiously useless. It fails to explain the development model Red Hat uses, contains gaping holes in the process, and is written in a barely decipherable style.

Perhaps Red Hat has accomplished wonderful things somewhere behind the unsatisfactory user experience I've focused on. For example, reportedly ELDS contains a first rate library minimization tool. But I haven't found it, nor is it documented; so I have no way of knowing whether it can benefit me as a user.

An Embedded Linux toolkit vendor faces a job quite different from that of an open source project leader. The latter can “scratch an itch”, as Eric Raymond says, focusing on some specific interesting task and letting others fill in the gaps. But a toolkit vendor must provide a complete user experience to compete with the more established RTOS vendors for busy customers. RTOS users simply want the OS to do its job and get out of the way so they can focus on application development. Providing some whiz-bang feature won't impress these users if they must struggle through weeks of learning curve to get their applications running.

These principles are especially true for an Embedded Linux toolkit, which after all has Linux itself behind it. Users choosing Linux for their target want to be able to run Linux applications, since otherwise some specialized RTOS will meet their needs. The back end of the toolkit had better not “improve” on Linux too much, or compatibility will be broken. This places still greater emphasis on the front end as the one of the most important areas for a toolkit to differentiate itself. It therefore surprises me that Red Hat has chosen to give the front end so little effort.

The end



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About the author: Jerry Epplin has written embedded software for the past fifteen years, primarily for medical devices. He can be reached at [email protected]





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