Re: [Chicken-users] Re: [Chicken-hackers] VS support

[felix winkelmann]

On 5/1/07, Brandon Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
> Now, the political part.  Since we're getting bug reports for Visual Studio,
> it's clear that people want to use it.  "We don't support MSVC" is the wrong
> message.  The correct message is "we can support MSVC if you're willing to
> do some testing and bug reporting."  In a CMake build, the incremental cost
> of supporting MSVC is quite low.

Ok. That's reasonable.

> Also at last count, Visual Studio .NET 2003 (my system) worked just fine.
> Visual Studio 2005 Express SP1 is what's broken, because it's Microsoft's
> free cheapass stripped down not-a-real-compiler.  Maybe it can be solved, or
> maybe the answer is "use a real compiler."  I do know it's real work to
> figure out, and I still don't wanna do it.  Seems nobody else wants to do it
> badly enough either.  This is open source, so whatever.  Once upon a time, I
> wanted MinGW to work badly enough that I Made It So [TM].  It cost me a
> man-year.  Because I laid out that groundwork once upon a time, it would
> probably cost a completely ignorant person 1 week to diagnose the VS 2005
> Express SP1 problem, and fix it if it can be fixed.

I don't think it is that easy. Someone with VS, Windows and deep chicken
knowledge is needed, I'm afraid.

> Somebody has to
> actually want to spend that week though.  Myself, I could probably solve the
> issue in 1..2 days, if I had those days.  Right now I certainly don't, and
> it may be quite awhile before I'm willing to make the time.
>
> I just don't believe in this idea of a "Windows Maintainer."  Framing it
> that way, just sounds like "we want 1 guy who's sucker enough to do all the
> gruntwork for us."  I don't think open source should be organized that way,
> although it frequently is that way.   I could be the Autoconf maintainer,
> frankly, if I wanted to be.  I rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty
> once upon a time.  I learned what was going on and refactored a lot of it.
> I had to do it to unify the build systems.  I had a goal, something was in
> my way, so I solved it.  Do I like Autoconf?  No, not in the slightest.  I
> think it's a complete waste of time.  But so are lotsa things in computers.
> People just have to make decisions about what they want and what they're
> willing to do to get them.  We shouldn't have a "Windows Maintainer" just to
> relieve everyone of would-be responsibilities.  The whole point of a unified
> build system is you get the benefit of other people solving other bugs on
> other platforms.  It's a distributed approach to open source.

I'm not talking about an official title, I was talking about someone who
knows enough of oll the parts to help here. I'm happy with groveling through
debug output and doing gruntwork all the time is what I do anyway. But
subtle Windows problems need someone who is actually capable of doing
that style of work (not someone who gets everything with "Windows" in its
title shoved over the table) and might give some hints are