As I mentioned before, I am a big fan of msi installers on windows. So I was really excited to see Garrett Serack announce an OSS package management system called CoApp that he has been authorized to work full time on.

In my point of view, Garrett really gets it. I’m hoping as a side effect of this project, WiX will get all sorts of dependency handling improvements.

I’ll be watching how this develops very closely.

Update: It seems that the facts presented to me in the initial bug report are not correct. I will be revising this article after the facts are settled. For now read the comments.

It all started with a simple bug encountered while trying to get PHP and WCF to play nice. Before you know it I was attempting to compile PHP on windows myself. That’s when I realized how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

These days I program in PHP and .NET for a living. In a past life I was a unix admin for small ISP where most of the internal unix infrastructure was FreeBSD while the managed customers tended to run Redhat.  Due to the unique path of my IT career, I usually don’t have a problem compiling open source software primarily targeted for unix on windows. PHP has proven to be a bit of an exception. However, with a little struggle, I got it to compile.

In this case the crux of the struggle was not a lack of documentation, but documentation outdated to the point of being wrong. This is perhaps the one exception to the rule postulated by Dick Brandon, “Documentation is like sex . . . when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.” Thankfully, Pierre of libgd fame pointed me in the right direction on the mailing list. So being a good netizen, I submitted a bug report so that someone with commit access to the php source repo could straighten the mess out. This was the response I received:

We don’t understand the build requirements or system.

You have to ask the Microsoft guys to update that file.
http://no.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.building.php was one of our
best Windows know-how (not-microsoft-employee) guy shot at documenting
the process, but the feedback he got from Microsoft employees was “this
is crap. its all wrong”.

Sorry, we simply do not know how to do this.

That was a little disheartening. I asked them to mark the readme file as outdated, and I asked them how to contact Microsoft. This was the response I received:

Updated the file to say its outdated.

As for contacting the Microsoft guys, try surfing around on
http://windows.php.net

We have tried multiple times to get these docs updated, with no luck so
far, and like I said; our last attempt was shot down and they wanted
those docs to be reverted.

I’m sorry, you are simply on your own here.

So it seems my only resort is to blog about it and hope someone from Microsoft is in earshot. If you care about PHP on windows, spread the word. Spread this article with twitter, digg, reddit, or just plain old email. If you have the ear of anyone in Microsoft give it a bend. I’ve never attempted blogger activism like this, but I don’t know what else to do. I much prefer to fix problems myself than delegating or inspiring. However, this is one case where I need to “have a little help from my friends.” I don’t even know what Microsoft finds wrong with the proposed updates to the documentation, so submitting updated documentation seems pointless.

It would appear that Microsoft is making significant progress in porting XP to the XO laptop. While I think the third world is better off learning Linux, I have no problem with them learning on a Microsoft platform, provided they make it suitable for their needs. They seem to be attempting to do that. I can’t say for sure that the OLPC is what the third world needs regardless of operating system, therefore I really can’t make a judgment as to which OS better serves said undefined needs. However, this is not a post to judge the merits of the OLPC or any OS that would run on it. Rather, its about red tape and misconceptions.

First the red tape. The technet article states that Microsoft cannot contribute to the OLPC project directly because of the open source license. It then seems to imply that Microsoft must reverse engineer the hardware because their engineers would somehow be tainted if they read the specs. I am quite ignorant of the OLPC project licenses, as well as open source hardware in general. So I have to assume that their lawyers are correct in their interpretation of whatever licenses govern the spec of the hardware.

This seems to be quite a hindrance. Granted the hindrance might be intentional. It seems to be similar to the hindrance that the GPL places on you reusing the code in a non open source project. I would expect many people that have worked on the OLPC project to be glad of this hindrance, just as many are glad of the hindrance that the GPL provides to their code being reused in a closed source project. However, many companies such as Sun and IBM are able to donate their programmers time and talents to Open Office, Apache, Firefox and other open source projects without “tainting” them. I think Microsoft could do similar. Even if it was impossible not to “taint” there developer, they are not in the business of making hardware or drivers. I doubt it would hurt Microsoft if the drivers they created for the custom XO hardware were all released as open source.

Now to tackle the misconception. James Utzschneider, the author of the technet blog, seems to think that the projects plan for supporting the laptop is to have the children patch the source code themselves.

And we have a different support model than OLPC is envisioning: we are not expecting K-6 school children to access the source code and do their own programming in the event they have to fix a problem in the computer. Certainly, we think there is a role for students in the support of school computers — in fact, as part of our Partners in Learningprogram we have trained over a million kids in a student helpdesk program (like in this case study from Brazil) — but we also think that local entrepreneurs and businesses need to play an important role here when you are talking about deployments involving tens of thousands of computers.

The angry young idealist in me started screaming of FUD immediately when I read this one. Just because the source is available, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to edit it. There has got to be a better support model than this. So I looked on the OLPC wiki page linked to by the article for more information and I found the following.

The laptop is an open-source machine: free software gives children the opportunity to fully own the machine in every sense. While we don’t expect every child to become a programmer, we don’t want any ceiling imposed on those children who choose to modify their machines. We are using open document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering. The children—and their teachers—will have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, hardware, and content.

The article contains no explicit statement of their support model. It does allow for students and teachers to modify the laptop, but acknowledges that not every child will become a programmer. A cursory search does not turn up a formal support model. However, very few support issues require a code change, especially for commodity software that have a much larger usage in testing scenarios than most code gets in production. So while the support model may be lacking, I don’t see where they assume the children will be hacking their own laptops except as a learning exercise.

I honestly hope this port of XP is successful, and that they ship some OLPCs running Windows. First of all it gives people more choices. Secondly, I’d like to see that translate in to a first world consumer oriented $200 laptop.

One of my more insignificant accomplishments as a software developer is discovering an digression between the actual error code two Windows API functions returned and the ones the MSDN claimed they returned. These two functions are NetUserGetGroups and NetUserGetLocalGroups. It took Microsoft three months and one day to get back to me with there response informing me of the changes made and thanking me for my feedback. Also, towards the bottom of there response was the following text.

A recent change on the MSDN Library has ended our ability to provide the
e-mail based feedback system you have been using for the past few years.
In the future, please take advantage of the two new mechanisms provided
by MSDN:

(1) Ratings and Feedback – a feature that pops-up when you hover near
the stars in the upper right hand corner of the Windows SDK
documentation pages on MSDN.

(2) Community Content – a feature added to the bottom of each page to
allow users registered with MSDN using a LiveId to ask questions and add
content

We invite you to use the Ratings and Feedback features to comment on and
give your rating for the topic itself. Please use the Community Content
option to ask questions and add your own developer guidance on the
topic. And continue to use the MSDN Forums for developer questions. We
appreciate your patience with this change to our system and very much
want your continued feedback, suggestions, and critique of our developer
content.

When I originally sent the bug report in there was no Community Content section at the bottom of every API doc page on MSDN. However, it was there when I received my response. Normally one would think that their response queue was backed up, and as a result it takes 3 months for them to get to these minor issues. However, it should be noted that on March 25th, the day before I received my response, I sent an email to the WiX users mailing list about some issues with their documentation and received a response the next day from Microsoft Technical Evangelist Bob Arson.

Many of you will say its coincidence. However, personally I feel Bob pulled the Microsoft equivalent of my FBI file to see if I had any negative marks in the eyes of Microsoft. After seeing this was not the case he noticed I sent an as yet unanswered email to the MSDN SDK feedback team, and he made a phone call to bump that to the top of the queue.

While I don’t believe Microsoft has a file on me, I do think that Bob or another Redmond employee could easily search for all correspondence I’ve had with Microsoft’s feedback mechanisms under a given email address. I know someone that that works for Microsoft. He has found bugs in products his team is not responsible for. Since he is a project manager, he can file a bug report internally and assign it directly to the appropriate programmer. The bug is usually closed unresolved and he is requested to file the bug through the public feedback mechanisms. This tells me two things. The first is their programmers don’t enjoy getting bug reports and hide behind bureaucracy. The second is that there is a unified bug tracking system at Microsoft. Assuming that public feedback mechanisms all filter into this, it would make sense that an appropriately entitled person could search for all tickets that reference my email address. If follows of course I assume that Bob was appropriately entitled.

So tell me folks, does anyone have any experiences with Microsoft Feedback teams that support or detract from my theory? Leave a comment because I would love to hear from you.