free software

[Max V. Zinal]

Hello everyone, have a good time of day.

Werner Koch wrote:
> The nice thing with the cross-compiler is that it can be used to hide
> many of the Windows unportabilties from the regular source.  We are
> currently working on using GNU's libio with mingw32/cpd - it will make
> things much smoother (e.g. fdopen).  Probably bad luck for MSC users.

What do you mean under `regular source`? UNIX-style code, with direct 
POSIX API calls, I suppose. From such a `regularity` :) you get all the 
`semantic problems` mentioned somewhere in that stream.

I'm pretty shure that you know how to write portable software, but your 
focus on UNIX-like systems is just a choice of your taste. This choice 
saves some worktime, I think, so it is good for you. A relatively small 
(although important) part of the Windows users (with a need for a 
modified GnuPG behaviour) should realize that your choice will greatly 
increase the amount of work for them.

It is not very straightforward to have a separate OS installation 
(Linux, I suppose?) just to compile a modified version of GnuPG. Adding 
patches will also be a hard work. I was going to say a few words about 
today's Linux-ification, but I do not want to start a flame war now ;)

Well, GnuPG is a free software, and its development team is free in it's 
choices. IMHO, a `bad luck for MSC users` could be easily avoided by 
adding a small OS-abstraction layer on the top of OS API, but this will 
lead to a great amount of small changes in an already-working code, 
which is not a GNU style of programming :). IMHO this is a good example 
of limitations of `bazaar`.

--
Max V. Zinal
mailto:Zlat0 at mail.ru