On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 01:03:49AM -0700, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
> # from David Golden
> >On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 9:23 AM, David Cantrell wrote:
> >> ... the complete lack of a reasonable set of
> >> tools on Windows, which just makes me angry whenever I have to
> >> touch the blasted thing, made me stop.
> >Definitely the lack of remote text based access makes it harder. But
> >for anyone willing to run Windows in a virtual machine, it's not
> >terribly hard anymore ...
> With a VM install, you still have to wade through the boggy experience
> of mousing-around in a completely foreign environment while swearing at
> the shell for being completely unreasonable about everything. But none
> of this has anything to do with whether your code works on Windows,
> only whether you can work within it. IMO, it would be much better to
> not be actually using windows (or mac for that matter) if that's not
> your preferred environment and you just need to debug some
> compatibility issue.
How can I debug a problem that only happens on Windows without using
Windows?
> Not to mention the general case of a CPAN author, where you can't assume
> that they could be bothered to *obtain* a windows/mac OS, let alone
> boot it. Some open and deployable environment / test kit would go much
> further than anything involving a VM and proprietary license.
Adam Kennedy tried to help with this, by persuading Microsoft to make a
few VMs available for perly people to use. I have no idea how
successful it's been.
> I think
> the utter lack of convenience in testing for and fixing cross-OS bugs
> is the big barrier to getting better cross-OS support. Nobody likes
> coding in the dark with a hours-long latency to see if their fix works.
This is why, when I can, I set up some kind of guest account on machines
that I use for CPAN-testing, so that authors can debug and fix things
themselves rather than rely on me to be "remote hands" which might have
a several *week* latency.
--
David Cantrell | Minister for Arbitrary Justice
When one has bathed in Christ there is no need to bathe a second time
-- St. Jerome, on why washing is a vile pagan practice
in a letter to Heliodorus, 373 or 374 AD
