Re: next release of Lout is approaching

[KHMan]

Remo Dentato wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 11:01 PM, Jeff Kingston <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I have just started preparing the next version of Lout, which
> > I hope to release a few weeks from now.
>
> Hi Jeff, this is a very good news!
>
> I have just one suggestions: would you incorporate into the official
> distribution, KHMan's changes to compile Lout on Windows? Just
> supporting mingw would be ok, one could have a "mingw" entry in the
> makefile.
>
> I think it would ease the adoption of Lout by Windows users.

I'm a bit ambivalent about this; the changes I did to do the MinGW 
compilation includes making a Win32-specific call to get the 
current directory path (and even then, it makes a non-Unicode 
call.) So I did not submit the changes for consideration because I 
think it's a really ugly thorn among nice portable code.

(The other bit is the PDF destination targeting code; which I have 
not done a single thing on so far. It's a little intrusive, and I 
think a rewrite would be good, because I did that whilst being an 
inexperienced C coder a long time ago. Any takers? Probably too 
late for this coming version...)

Instead I would suggest that: (1) let the MinGW fixes stay as its 
own custom version, and (2) check or tweak to see that Lout can 
compile and run on Cygwin. Then maybe drop (1) and point to (2).

Also, since Lout may write to its library directory, it may run 
afoul of Vista security rules, if someone deign to install it in a 
certain way. There is no quick and easy way to redo the Unixy Lout 
to run the Windows way good and proper, so I consider the MinGW 
command-line version an evolutionary dead end. If I were to do all 
of this again, I would have stuck to Cygwin... :-)

I think Cygwin would be a better in the long term rather than DOS 
Prompt. Even I hardly use DOS Prompt any more, it's usually a Msys 
shell or a Cygwin shell. DOS Prompt is more and more a thing of 
the past on Win32 for non-'IT admin' users. Being less of a novice 
programmer now, I would now want to keep project files up to date 
using at least a makefile, and for this I would immediately prefer 
to be using bash on Msys or Cygwin.

At least Cygwin on Win32, at the moment, has a secure future 
(better still with Unicode support coming in 1.7) and a healthy 
community with good and proper shell scripting, and can 
accommodate Lout most easily.

Just my 2 cents. Other views welcome.

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia