Hi Vitaly, On Sat, 4 Mar 2023 at 19:20, 'Vitaly Orekhov' via prosody-dev <[email protected]> wrote: > I decided to open this thread for discussion as I'm going to take long-term > (if I won't run in any circumstances that don't depend on me) Windows support > on my own, after seven years of half-dead state of Prosody for this platform.
Thanks for your post, and your recent patch submissions. Sorry I haven't responded to any yet - I'm currently under some time pressure for other work, and I have limited time for patch review currently. However I don't want you to feel ignored :) That said, the whole topic of Windows support does deserve some discussion. I can write a few words from my perspective, and also summarize the feelings of the core Prosody developers. We used to have a team member who primarily worked on Windows. They haven't been active for many years, and have switched to another OS anyway. We tried to maintain Windows support for a short while in case anyone was using it, but at some point it became too difficult. There are various things that come to mind when thinking about potentially re-adding Windows support: 1) Is there sufficient demand for it? Although not uncommon for developer desktops Windows servers are a minority compared to Linux/BSD. 2) In recent years we have automated tests, CI, builds and packaging for Prosody on all our supported platforms. This has always been much harder to achieve for Windows, but I now consider these things a strict requirement for any new platform we support. 3) We try to keep platform specific code isolated wherever possible, however adding a new platform inevitably affects the entire codebase. There are small quirks of every platform (e.g. you found out about the weird stdio buffering on Windows that affects console output logging). More platforms means more code complexity, which means more maintenance burden and slower development. There is a cost to supporting more platforms, and we've been planning to remove a huge chunk of dead code left behind from Windows support: https://hg.prosody.im/timber/rev/c72ecf61d0d1 Now, despite all this, you are clearly very motivated to get Prosody running on Windows again. And I don't want to get in your way :) My proposal for now is that we get you access to the community's contrib repo, and there you can freely maintain a Windows branch with your commits. From there, we can see how it goes in the long term: How large are the changes? How easy is it to test, build and package? How many people are interested in it? What do you (and others) think? Regards, Matthew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "prosody-dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prosody-dev/CAJt9-x5Ff871EditYCmvNPwpNp1DQVz%2BOAGLVdOd3hnY3QzeOw%40mail.gmail.com.
