Bob Paddock wrote:
E: Yes, I agree, but all my users are on Windows...
Have you ever asked them why?
Perhaps because it's easier to download winavr than get avr-gcc working
on FreeBSD?
More seriously, there are two main reasons that I see why a lot of
development work (my own included) is done on windows rather than *nix,
even though many of the programs used are cross-platform. One is the
use of windows-specific hardware and software combinations - AVR Studio
being an example. If you have some windows-specific software, you can
often run it under *nix by using Wine, or even a virtual machine if
necessary. But if it requires close contact with hardware, it's a lot
more difficult (note that I have not actually tried AVR Studio with
Wine, this is just a general observation). License locking schemes can
also make it a lot more difficult to run Windows software on *nix.
Secondly, although decent Linux distros (and FreeBSD) make it extremely
easy to get hold of and install a wide range of software, this only
applies to "standard" software for which someone is acting as a
maintainer. When you want to install or upgrade any of the tens of
thousands of packages in the Debian archives, it is vastly easier than
in the Windows world. But when you step outside of that, you enter the
world of dependency resolution, patching, ./configure, and make, instead
of an InstallShield wizard. Thus when trying to install avr-gcc on
FreeBSD you have to fiddle around with -DNOPORTDOCS flags in the "make
install" line, while on windows you just download the latest winavr
release. One day, one of the newer "universal" package systems will
catch on, so that we'll be able to download and install the latest
nixavr release, but until that time I doubt if anyone can be bothered
maintaining the separate deb, rpm, tgz, etc., files needed for all the
commonly used *nix systems.
Just my two øre,
David
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