[Pan-devel] Re: Re: Building PAN on Windows

[Duncan]

DPA posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Sat, 11 Feb 2006 15:20:44 -0500:

>  Right now he is running Agent but he would like to use PAN and this is
>  an interesting Challenge for me.

OK, I understand the concept of "interesting challenges". =8^)

> If I do manage to get it done and if Charles doesn't mind I will host
> the installer somewhere for people to download if they want to test the
> CVS version on Windows.

I don't believe he'd mind, as he has on a number of occasions reminded
folks that PAN is GPL, and even given them pointers to places in the code
to change, if they wanted something that didn't agree with PAN's current
policies.  The biggest example has been PANs absolute 100% GNKSA
compliance policy.  Charles he has repeatedly answered requests to break
that in one way or  another, saying PAN won't as long as he's developing
it, but at the same time, pointing out where in the code to look for that
feature, and saying if they want to tweak it and compile it themselves or
even fork, that's what the GPL is all about -- empowering them to do just
that -- only he'll have no part of moving PAN away from GNKSA as long as
he develops PAN.

Of course, there's a big difference between an agree-to-go-different-ways
but approved fork, and direct cooperation.  Still, while I'm not
claiming to speak for him, I doubt he'd have a problem with it and may
even directly link it on PAN's site, thus making the cooperation a fact. 

Charles had sunk a good deal of effort into making PAN run on MS, and if
I'm empathizing correctly, must be pretty disappointed in how difficult it
has been to keep a working GTK+2 on MS, thus, how hard it has remained to
get and keep a usable PAN on the platform.  I know I'd be disappointed if
I'd sunk that kind of time and energy, only to have the thing more or less
constantly broken anyway, or at least very hard to compile, because the
dependencies weren't being kept up.  That could be pretty demotivating,
and I'm going out on a limb here guessing way further than I have facts
to support, but it's possible that's one of the things that caused Charles
to take that 18-month-ish vacation from PAN development.

If all or even most of that (perhaps save for the last speculation) is
correct, and based upon previous comments Charles has made, he'd like very
much for PAN to become more widely available and usable on MS platforms,
and is likely to be very supportive of anything helping that happen. 
Thus, unless there's some aspect of the situation I know nothing about,
I'd expect not only that Charles won't mind, but that he's likely to be
actively supportive of the idea!  Various individuals from the various
distributions have been the point-people for those distributions, and I
expect Charles would be very happy to have someone willing to do the same
for MS platforms.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html