Re: whose Windoze build it is anyways

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> From: Hans Ronne [mailto:hronne@comhem.se]
>
> > So far, all we have heard from you is that you are unable to
> > build a simple
> > Windows app, despite trying hard for a week. Which raises
> > questions about
> > your ability to contribute in a meaningful way to Xconq development.
>
> Well equally, what you guys have proven is you don't competently
> maintain and communicate a proper Windoze build enviornment.  Not can't,
> but don't.  I'm sure you guys do fantastic Linux build maintenance.
> Your treatment of Windoze leaves a lot to be desired.  Honestly, if you
> pulled any of this stuff with your Linux build, people would laugh at
> you.  They'd say you were bad Linux developers.  Since you're good Linux
> and Mac developers, I don't exactly expect you to be good Windoze
> developers.  But I do expect you to not make excuses for your worst
> practices.
OK all, let's cool it with the attitudes, settle down, and Uncle Stan
can tell you the whole story.

Once upon a time, around 1991-2 I think, there was somebody who tried
to adapt the code into a Windows program, using some Novell(?) app
framework, with some help from me.  It partly worked, I might even have
a binary archived somewhere, but I think the person lost interest, and
I wasn't working on Xconq at the time (this was long before 7.0).

Later, when I was working at Cygnus, we had a version of GDB (WinGDB)
that was built using MSVC, had a fancy Windows GUI etc. It was horrible
to maintain though; I managed GDB at the time, and assigning someone
to work on WinGDB bugs was a handy punishment. 1/2 :-) When cygwin got
good enough, we switched over, used tcl/tk for GUI, and didn't look
back. So that colored my experience, and I decided I didn't want to
build Windows GUI for Xconq from scratch. (The part where using
Windows was like jabbing hot needles in my eyes also played a part;
I know my way around the system, but it's never been comfortable.)

But tcl/tk had a Windows port, and so I figured that was a way to get
something onto the platform with minimal effort; maybe a Windows fan
would try the tcl/tk port, and think "this should have a true Windows
port instead" and sign up to do the work. Well, the results were kind
of disappointing; the reaction was "this looks weird, I'll try it when
it's perfected" - as if Windows programs were some kind of paradigm of
superior interface! So after all the work to get it running at all,
my interest kind of evaporated. Open source development is an n-way
street; I've given away untold hours of my time over the past 17 years,
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone who wants to take
advantage of it to contribute a few weeks or months of effort of their
own.

So I'm all for a pure Windows GUI, that's one of the reasons I spent
months cutting the code into interface and kernel; cygwin is handy
but MSVC projects are OK if that's how you want to build things; and a
friendly attitude always works better for cooperation than hostility.
The Xconq goal has always been to accomodate any platform that developers
are interested in supporting.

Stan