Re: gEDA-user: Re: Gedda-user: Building Gedda under Windows

[Al Davis <ad62@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 06 March 2005 12:32 am, marvindickens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
wrote:
> Perhaps, the question is, are you interested in attracting
> users to gEDA or attracting desktops? It seems to me that if
> your serious about attracting desktops, you've got to have
> something enticing. In my mind, gEDA is enticing. In this
> senario, you don't port. OTOH, are you interested in
> attracting users to gEDA and not attracting desktops, you
> port. Personally, I belive it is in the best interest of gEDA
> to port. Leave the desktop wars to the kernel hackers and the
> distro maintainers and worry about our own back yard.

To reopen this (oops)......

Speaking for myself ...

When I develop I try to do it in a portable manner.  If I had to 
actually try everything on all platforms, it would take so much 
time as to kill the project.  Therefore, I distribute only 
source, in the hopes that it will compile on many platforms.

If you look at the various Linux and BSD systems, you will see 
that many of them have ports done by someone other than the 
original developer.   I am not aware of any systems that have 
binary packages made by the original author.  Some of those 
doing ports read this list.  Thanks to these ports, people 
using particular systems have a trivial way to do an install.  
This makes these particular systems preferable for running our 
tools. 

For Windows ports, someone needs to take responsibility for it.  
The duties of this person or these people are to make sure it 
compiles in that environment, prepare source packages in that 
environment, prepare object packages, and find or provide a 
distribution site.  That someone should really use the target 
platform, thus have a need to do the port.  It should be 
someone other than the developer of the package, even if the 
developer of the package uses the target platform.

To illustrate the last statement .....  I develop on a Debian 
system.  Someone else (Hamish Moffatt) maintains the Debian 
port.