Hi, Sorry for answering that late, I was away a bit and could catch up properly only now.
This email is unfortunately a bit long, sorry for that too. On Sun, Jun 23, 2013, Ruben Van Boxem wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I have come to the conclusion that my MinGW-w64 builds bring too little to > the table for me to continue maintaining them. > > I strongly encourage you to use the plethora of toolchains in a multitude > of configurations available at mingw-builds. Comparing download numbers > they have a much higher visibility, and e.g. their adoption by the Qt > Project speaks of their quality. They have succeeded in doing what I missed > when I decided to start building GCC, so my effort spent in doing that is > now wasted. > > I may dabble into getting Clang 3.3 to work on Windows, perhaps even with > libc++, but I am not promising anything. > > I'll still linger around here though, don't worry. This is sad to read. As a packager I can only understand, in particular when you say that you will probably continue but not try to be as up-to-date as you've been so far, which you've done remarkably well. I believe no such work is ever "wasted work". Remember that a few years ago, GCC for Windows meant mingw.org and lots of issues, starting with building your own toolchain. The current ease of build proves how much work on this has been done by everyone: building, helping, testing, fixing and so on. If I've understood correctly, you're basing your decision partly on the download stats from SF.net and the use of the mingw-builds toolchains by the Qt project. Aaron Seigo had mentionned that the toolchain for the Qt project SDK had to use Dwarf2 EH. He also had a whole liste of *hard* requirements (like having multilib [ which I don't understand since QtCreator would hide it anyway ]). This is a case where having more choice changes a lot of things: most of us don't build multilib toolchains with dwarf2 eh. This choice doesn't change anything to the quality of the toolchains and of the work behind them. As for the download stats, I've been trying to understand them for quite some time now without much luck. I was trying to see which impact the new download page would have. I haven't been able to see a difference. Mingw-builds has around 600 downloads per day, half of it seems to be metadata for the installer. I guess that the installer downloads the metadata file which then tells it which downloads are available (I might be completely wrong). This means that there are 300 new toolchain installations everyday. Close to 10k each month and that's around 30k for three month, until the next minor version comes out. In turn, this means there are at least 30k people installing toolchains themselves. I find this hard to believe: people are too lazy for that. We don't have much data for the downloads. When do they happen during the day, where from in the world, by which User Agent, ... ? For yypkg, I have a separate hosting and a webalizer on it. I lack details but I have some more information than what we get from sf.net. For the first 6 days of July, I got around 900 hits from a wget running on "mingw32", i.e. the download client in yypkg and definitely not something else (bots, indexers, pidgins, ...). Due to the way yypkg works, this amounts to 2 to 3 downloads per day (I haven't advertized anything recently). Again, if we sum that over a few weeks, it's hundreds of users. I haven't heard *anything* from them. All I know is that they exist. It feels like looking for the Higgs Boson or black matter. You usually don't hear about users and I'm under the impression that for packagers it's even worse. However there are users; it might be difficult to understand who they are, where they are and how they use the binaries but they definitely exist. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind but I know this has been an open question for a long time now and currently we're probably missing 99% of the answer. PS: adding something to the download page is available to any packager that provides the same amount of information as the other toolchains (copy-paste, replace with your own values); I don't think the page is currently crowded. I'll be spending some time on it again soon. -- Adrien Nader ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Mingw-w64-public mailing list Mingw-w64-public@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mingw-w64-public
