Bryan Creer writes:
| I'm in a state of shock. I find myself totally agreeing with something Phil
| Taylor has said -
Hmmm ... Maybe you need to adjust your medication.
| John Chambers had said -
|
| >Great! Someone provides a program that solves the problem of binary
| >incompatibility by supplying the source in ANSI C. Several people
| >report compiling it on various obscure systems without any problems.
|
| Nice to have maybe but the only thing that really has to be portable across
| all systems and all software packages is abc itself and at the moment it
| isn't.
True, but not quite what I was getting at. Critisizing a programmer
for not investing in the hardware and software that it takes to
provide everyone with binaries is hardly appropriate. The right thing
to do is to call for volunteers to compile the code and produce
downloadable binaries.
Very few programmers have the time or funds to provide binaries for
everyone. This should be a job for the users on this list to
coordinate.
As a programmer, I find that I don't have time to try to keep up with
all the complications of the commercial binary software market. If I
tried to do that, I wouldn't have any time for programming (or even
for playing music). I probably don't have the money, either,
considering what it takes to support a development and testing
environment that even covers the most popular commercial platforms. I
work mostly on unix-type systems, where most compilers are available
free and the runtime libraries don't change every six months in
incompatible ways. But even there, buying the hardware needed to
create binaries for everyone would be beyond my funds (or the space
in my house).
Providing binaries for musicians who aren't computer geeks is a good
idea. But it isn't going to be done by the few people writing the
programs, and they shouldn't be criticised for not doing it. This
pretty much has to be done by the users who have access to the
hardware and who have compilers and such.
One possibility is that the sourceforge repository can hold binaries
for lots of systems. This would take a bit of coordinating, but it's
a very reasonable use of this facility. Anyone want to organize it?
(Beware - it could suck up a lot of your time. ;-)
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