Herold Heiko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > However there are still lots of people using Windows NT 4 or even > win95/win98, with old compilers, where the compilation won't work > without the patch. Even if we place a comment in the source file or > the windows/Readme many of those will be discouraged, say those who > do have a compiler but aren't really developers (yet) (for example > first year CS students with old lab computer compilers).
>From my impressions of the Windows world, non-developers won't touch source code anyway -- they will simply use the binary. The really important thing is to make sure that the source works for the person likely to create the binaries, in this case you. Ideally he should have access to the latest compiler, so we don't have to cater to brokenness of obsolete compiler versions. This is not about Microsoft bashing, either: at at least one point Wget triggered a GCC bug; I never installed the (ugly) workaround because later versions of GCC fixed the bug. Also note that there is a technical problem with your patch (if my reading of it is correct): it unconditionally turns on debugging, disregarding the command-line options. Is it possible to save the old optimization options, turn off debugging, and restore the old options? (Borland C seems to support some sort of "#pragma push" to achieve that effect.) There are other possibilities, too: * Change the Makefile to compile the offending files without optimization, or with a lesser optimization level. Ideally this would be done by configure.bat if it detects the broken compiler version. * Change the Makefile to simply not use optimization by default. This is suboptimal, but would not be a big problem for Wget in practice -- the person creating the binaries would use optimization in his build, which means most people would still have access to an optimized Wget. > Not yet, but I will certainly. Nevertheless, I think the point is > the "continue to support existing installation if possble" issue, > after all VC6 is not free either, and at least one newer commercial > VC version has been reported to compile without problems. Those, > however, certainly don't support Win95, probably don't Win98/ME > or/and NT4 either (didn't yet check though). You mean that you cannot use later versions of C++ to produce Win95/Win98/NT4 binaries? I'd be very surprised if that were the case! > Personally I feel wget should try to still support that not-so-old > compiler platform if possible, Sure, but in this case some of the burden falls on the user of the obsolete platform: he has to turn off optimization to avoid a bug in his compiler. That is not entirely unacceptable.
