On 7/4/2010 4:52 PM, Sam Carleton wrote: > On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 1:27 AM, William A. Rowe Jr. <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> On 7/3/2010 8:53 AM, Sam Carleton wrote: >>> >>> Why? why why why? I simply don't get it >> >> Sam, please don't waste your energy venting at APR or any other open >> source effort, take your issues to MS just as we've all tried. > > So if it is Microsoft stopping you
No Sam, the VC team has done all they can to impede, not to 'stop' open source projects from offering consistent, interoperable behavior. I'll limit my reply to speak to the actual issues, rather than the rest of the silliness in your rant. The science of binary versioning of a single shared library resource was solved a very long time ago, so it's strange this still is not applied sensibly for such a critical, common requirement as C language applications. Somehow, all the rest of the MS OS related teams are held to such a basic requirement, so it's just puzzling. At the time 2.2 binaries were -first- released, there was not quite an entirely free solution to building these, and whichever choice of a more modern compiler was picked would have resulted in lock-in to that flavor. At that time, Perl and Python from ActiveState were on two different versions, neither on msvcrt. The 'lite' (free) flavor of the compiler shipped a crippled toolchain, with basic tools missing from the collection. And so, we are stuck/ sticking with the flavor first shipped as 2.2, so that modules which already interoperate continue to keep doing so, until 2.4 (or even 2.3 betas) ship. Now there are Strawberry Perl and other alternatives, and now that there are more solutions today, now that the 'express' flavors include the various toolchain components, and the DDK team continues to find ways to provide the msvcrt.dll functionality, as your link points out. It becomes a question of what the best choice is, and you are writing to the wrong list for that whole discussion. But there are reasons the tone of your post falls on deaf ears. One, you are on the wrong list. Second, this is Open Source Code; we welcome you and everyone who likes to compile it exactly as you like, and we've put no impediments in your way, even done what we can to deal with different versions of windows, msvc (and gcc, sun cc etc etc etc). The binaries are just a convenience, if they are created at all, they have nothing to do with the development and promulgation of the Source Code we are providing to the public at no charge, which is our entire purpose.
