On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 09:50:51AM +0100, Andre Poenitz wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 07:36:36AM -0500, John Weiss wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 02:09:33PM +0100, Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote:
> > >
> > > I feel we are beginning on a slippery slope now... ok to support
> > > windows if only minimal changes are needed... but now we see more and
> > > more changes needed to support this.
> > >
> > > I am not sure that I am really happy about this "progress"
> >
> > Nor should you be.
> >
> > Doing true full-Windows support in an inherently-unix program is a
> > very thorny, messy situation.
>
>
> I don't see any particular strong reason to dislike either.
It's not a matter of dislike. It's a warning: There Be Dragons Here.
And, it's a warning from someone who's spoken with the knights who
went into that cave before, long ago. And who has a scorchmark or two
of his own.
BTW: Thanks, Andre, for reminding me *why* I responded in the
first place, a response rather unfairly dismissed by Asger with an
ad-hominem attack.
The arguing *has* already started.
Guys, guys: There's a reason why a Proxy-API like Cygwin exists. (By
"Proxy", I mean the design-patterns defn. of the term.) Because,
eventually, any program that supports both Windows and Unix will have
to make some of its calls through such a platform-independent
Proxy-API. Whether that Proxy-API is someone else's
do-everything-for-everyone solution (like Cygwin), or whether you
implement it yourself just for your program is immaterial. The
exercise of writing those Proxy classes can be a lot of fun.
Nevertheless, someone will need to do it and it will take effort.
(IIRC, the guy I keep mentioning from where I used to work had also
done some platform-independence-layer-stuff for VAX<-->Unix, and it
wasn't any easier. Seems to be the nature of the beast.)
P.S.: I'm not saying all of this to be discouraging. Asger, by all
means, *do* write a good pi-layer for LyX. You're certainly capable
of it. I'm just saying that you're heading into the Dragons' Cave
with nowhere near as much armor as those who trod in before you wore.
:)
--
John Weiss
