[vlc-devel] VLC and Windows

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le Friday 21 September 2007 20:57:42 Tony Anecito, vous avez écrit :
> Hi Rafael,
> I agree with Bill. And I have asked for help and
> usually get the response "change to a different build
> system" or "sorry our build environment is not Cygwin
> but we cross compile for windows" YET the dlls they
> claim to have built are NEVER EVER made avialable for
> distribution for testing. So I continue to struggle
> with every change that is made and spend weeks getting
> a windows build (maybe). I have spent weeks when my
> builds work helping the team fix windows and java bugs
> that do go into the builds.

This strikes me as "your entire fault". When basing your development work on 
the development tree of someone else, you do accept that it will keep 
breaking.

> I like some others do work in the CORP environment and
> changing the build environment so rapidly is looked
> upon in a very negative manner.

I, like all others *currently* notable VLC contributor work on my free time. I 
don't care for a company that uses my work, yet fails to contribute to 
actually improve our project.

> I have also worked for 
> 23+ years doing software development and understand
> the need of what you ask but like Bill I see a 50%
> windows user base in the forums and wonder the risk of
> of losing people supporting development of that
> platform by removing or changing drastically the build
> support.

In fact, I barely care about our download counter. I do care that we improve 
the feature set of VLC and fix the design issues (whatever the cost).

And I do not care how crappy the software may be on Windows. To me, we are 
already investing more volunteer time into Windows than we should. It strikes 
that Windows has been the singlest biggest source of releases delays and the 
contrib became such a huge time shink for those who maintain it.

Microsoft has deliberately chosen to make its platform open-source unfriendly 
(except for Windows-only open-source software perhaps). It should come to as 
no surprise that the Windows port is bad regardless of the effort of 
Quovodis, JB, Xtophe, Meuuh and others into the Windows port and/or the 
contrib, when it still provides such a ridiculously and annoying non-standard 
API for just about everything.

To date, every major operating system but Windows has standardized at least to 
some extent, atop the Unix/POSIX APIs. Even Symbian, which is probably even 
more closed/proprietary than Windows does provide better POSIX emulation (and 
VLC still does not support it).

> All I want is the dlls that the Linux group (JVLC)
> claims to have built for windows yet never distribute.
> I have asked repeatedly and was met with silence
> (probably from what I have seen thier builds really no
> longer work). Remember, I am the windows developer who
> suggested fixes but if I do not have stable
> environment to work in then I can not help the team.

It is your duty to stabilize your build system, not ours. Especially if you 
are corporate, while we are volunteer. We owe you nothing.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/