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Wholly unnecessary flame. (was Re: pyXML!)

Donn Cave donn at u.washington.edu
Tue Sep 26 14:06:31 EDT 2000 
Quoth root at 127.0.0.1 (David):
| On Tue, 26 Sep 2000 11:47:52 +0200, Monty Taylor <mtaylor at goldridge.net>
| wrote:
|>> VC does not come installed on every windows machine you know.
|>
|> Which is a fairly appropriate summary as to why Open Source projects do tend to
|> wither a bit on Windows. It's not quite so much fun to contribute if you have
|> to pay for the priviledge.
|
| Why is Visual C/C++ being used?  Why not Cygwin or Borland C/C++?  The
| latter two are both freely available; one of them is, IIRC, even open
| source.

Bleah.  I haven't used any of these products, but it reminds me of the
futility of trying to work with source projects on the Macintosh, which
also suffers from the curse of vendor compiler environments.

My rant would be futile too, but I want to make a point to some folks
who I sometimes think are sliding down that slope.  In the UNIX world,
we have it really easy.  I can untar a source distribution on any random
UNIX (or BeOS) host and stand a decent chance of getting it to build.
I don't get a blob of junk that can be read by only the latest versions
of the currently popular IDE.

That's a critical factor in the existence of "Open Source".  The GNU
tools have had a big influence on this situation, because they're good
and they're freely available for a lot of platforms.  But if it gets
to the point where the gcc, GNU make or whatever become the exclusive
build environment for some distribution, then that's just as bad.  If
you care about things like this, you don't serve this principle by
embracing GNU because they led the way.  You have to make your own
stuff portable.  Pardon me if that seems obvious, but some recent
experiences suggest it isn't.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu
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