On 09/29/2011 03:55 PM, Dima Klenchin wrote:
I have a feeling that the lack of Windows software continues to be mostly due to the irrational animosity toward it rather than the platform-specific issues. After all, there seemed to be many developers who were happy to code for MacOS 7-9 but refused to release anything that runs in Windows. Meanwhile, that is the only platform we never hear about installation and dependencies issues. Given the large number of Windows versions of CCP4 downloaded, I assume this is not because nobody actually installs Windows software.
I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case this is not true. It's just down to convenience.
I develop on Linux because I install the OS and have a complete software development environment with everything I need pre-installed, or at most accessible after less than 5 minutes of playing with the unified software manager.
For OSX, we have machines about the lab I can ssh into where other people have set up the build environment so I can use it in almost exactly the same way. I don't know how much work that was for them.
For Windows, I have to arrange a license, install, deal with a much more painful registration and security update process, and then install a load more 3rd party tools before I can even start working. That or try and figure out the convoluted steps required to get cross compilation to work.
That's all there really is too it. Kevin
