Re: [Chicken-users] Visual Studio is here

[Peter Bex]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 10:18:10PM +0300, Oleg Kolosov wrote:
> On 24 Nov 2014, at 12:44, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:
> The main benefit from this is that there is no more “cross chicken”: just 
> host and target. So it’s actually possible.

This sounds interesting.  I don't know much about cross-compilation,
though, so I have no idea whether there's a good reason that
cross-chicken exists.

> >> The development is completely public, on github, and I don’t mind breaking 
> >> things, maybe this will encourage people who does not want to bother with 
> >> patches and mailing lists to contribute.
> > 
> > We already have a manpower problem, with not enough people contributing.
> > Diluting this manpower across two projects is wasteful and hurts *both*
> > projects.
> 
> This is not my intention. Considering that commits to the core are quite 
> rare, by putting some action to github I was hoping to make the the project 
> more visible.

I'm very relieved to hear this!

> > But more importantly, I'd really hate to see all your work go to waste.
> > I've seen it before, and done it myself even: if you just go off on your
> > own and hack, merging back the work is going to be Very Hard.  If you
> > just send a huge patch bomb to the mailinglist, that will make it
> > impossible for us to merge it back, not only due to the inevitable merge
> > conflicts but also because too large patches are hard to digest.
> 
> Well, actual code changes, not counting moves and renames, are quite small. 
> I’m still not sure how it will work in the end. I guess most of these things 
> will require few tries, so to not waste anyones time I will experiment in my 
> own branches.

Experimentation is fine.  If in the end you can produce small self-contained
patches, I'm all for it.

> > Evntually, CHICKEN 5 may evolve beyond the ability to merge back changes
> > into your branch.  The same will happen vice versa.  This will ensure
> > people will need to choose between your branch or ours, which is unfair
> > and unnecessary.
> 
> To make this clear: mine - "try you wildest ideas, don’t complain if it eats 
> your cat” (broken builds, merge conflicts); mainline - peer reviewed, stable 
> and time proven.

Excellent, thank you for stating this clearly!

> > How many platforms are you testing on?
> 
> Windows 7: (MSVC, MinGW32), MacOS X (Xcode and ninja build), occasionally 
> cross compile for Linux (x86 and MIPS) with the eggs and run on our device.

Nice, that's quite a few test systems.  Do you think you could
contribute a Salmonella Windows box?  That would be helpful in
making egg authors aware of how their eggs are doing on Windows.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://www.more-magic.net