Could we agree to disagree and come together on improvements and clean-up?

[Jan Wielemaker]

On Saturday 31 May 2008 18:18:59 Pedro Gimeno wrote:
> Jan Wielemaker wrote:
> > I hope that if I have time to look into
> > this again I can move the entire toolchain to build SWI-Prolog on Win32
> > and Win64 to MinGW, both to get at a more uniform build platform and to
> > liberate users and developers from MSVC.
>
> You probably mean to lock them in to Windows, not to liberate them from
> MS(VC).

That is a bit strong statement. Not so long ago you had totally locked
Solaris from SUN without a free compiler except for a GCC port. Much
longer ago they shipped cc, but it was so crappy I switched to gcc as
soon as I saw it.  Nevertheless, SUN wasn't really considered that bad.

My development platform is Linux. I am very unhappy about Unix-like
systems having their development platform poorly arranged. Most luckily
died. MacOS X remains. I'm even more unhappy about Windows that costs a
*lot* of time to keep it running. Looking at downloads though, I see
(taking an arbitrary month) 75% Win32, 7% Win64, 5% MacOSX, 7% Linux
32bits RPM and 6% source.  Excluding mirrors, Linux distributions and
GIT/CVS access.

What do you want? People buy a laptop/PC, get Windows, can play games
and ok, (development) software in Windows ported from Unix is crappy. I
don't want to preach in this matter. Only if someone complains that some
feature is running crap on Windows I tell them it runs fine on anything
else and if they want to use it quickly they better install Linux.
Otherwise, I just try do keep the Windows versions as much as possible
compatible.

	Cheers --- Jan