[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Do you want VS .NET 2003 support?

[Raimar Falke <i-freeciv-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 06:41:52PM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> From: Raimar Falke [mailto:i-freeciv-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> > Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> > >
> > > [about trendy buzzwords]
> >
> > I thought that MDA (model driven architecture) is "hot". And better
> > than XP (extreme programming). And server-side Java stuff.
> 
> I've bookmarked http://www.omg.org/mda/ and will look at it sometime,
> along with Extreme programming.  I'm generally interested in "better
> mousetraps" but a lot of things don't end up being better in practice.
> I think MDA and Extreme Programming are, at a glance, sufficiently
> complex methodologies that one couldn't trivially decide the
> "betterness" of one or the other.  It would probably take a lot of
> experience, a lot of work, and a lot of consulting skill to fully
> realize either's potentials.

Hmm I was told that XP is over its climax these days.

> > This together with some config
> > file/makefile (distributed) would solve some problems. People would be
> > able to compile it at home. People can make changes at
> > home. Maintainers can test it. I'm not sure if freeciv.org can
> > distribute a compiled binary here. And in case the user has better
> > stuff (like the full VS) at home I'm sure the user can import the
> > config file and continue from there.
> 
> Actually it doesn't solve problems.  You are assuming that someone would
> maintain VS .NET 2003 build files using NMAKE, on the command line.
> Someone like myself would not, they'd use Solution files, which are tied
> to the IDE. It is possible to export NMAKE files, but this only benefits
> someone who paid $25 to have the DDK compiler shipped to them (assuming
> I even remember correctly.)  Why bother?

A lot of people here know about makefiles. Writting these is not the
problem.

> Really this is a chicken-and-egg problem.  People like myself go ahead
> and spend money for VS .NET 2003; other people don't want to.  One
> solution would be to recruit students who have site licenses at their
> universities.  *They* aren't spending any money, and they could develop
> Windows-specific stuff.  But someone has to want to bother to recruit
> them.  Reality is, if you guys are all Linux developers, why do you
> care?

Because there are more installed windows systems out there. All of
these should see how much fun it is to play Freeciv ;)

> I suppose you could put out a request to some newsgroups or mailing
> lists somewhere, asking for others who care and want to get on board
> with it.  That person can't be me, because I don't have ownership /
> concern for the future of Freeciv.  I'll just be making some
> contributions when my coding solves generic problems in the Freeciv
> codebase.  And I don't know how long that will go on.  At some point, my
> code will diverge too much to bother, or I'll shift to some other
> project.  In the interim I'm willing, however, to work with someone else
> who wants to "own" VS .NET 2003 support.

I'm not sure if you see all aspects of this. Having VS support does
not buy much because only a few Windows users will download the source
and have VS and will compile Freeciv. What we want is a windows
binary. What we want is a windows binary which we can distribute (true
for Cygwin/MinGW; I'm not sure about VS here). We want to create the
windows binary on a unix system by cross-compiling because this fits
with the existing tool chain and is the easiest. We want to create a
windows version daily by a cron-driven script.

Cygwin/MinGW aren't nice in the setup and maybe also in the other
areas but they enable us to create daily windows binaries (see
ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/latest/freeciv-win-*).

        Raimar

-- 
 email: rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 "Last year, out in California, at a PC users group, there was a demo of
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