Microsoft will always own the NT server market and there will be a miniscule following for AS on NT. A survey would likely show that the number of active AS users (users, not IP addresses) is already tiny compared to Apache and IIS. As a product with a smallish audience, it makes a lot of sense to focus on doing the best thing for 99% of the userbase rather than investing in things that will benefit 1% of the userbase and at the same time potentially harm the 99% because of added complexity, less time to test on the Unix platforms because of testing on Win platforms, more tech support required for Win platforms because of less use/less testing/fewer users beating on it, etc.
Not trying to start a flame war here - I know everyone has their likes and dislikes when it comes to computing platforms. I'd really like to see a survey done of how many active AOLServer users there are, what platforms they're using, and so on. Maybe I'll get around to doing it one of these days. I think the results would make decisions like these crystal clear. Maybe I'll have time to do it one of these daze... Jim > > Cygwin is a great toolkit, and I heartily recommend it to anyone > who is used to working on Unix. But I would like to see AOLserver 4 > continue to run natively under Win32. In addition to Cygwin taking > up disk space and adding another layer of debugging / installation / > configuration > complexity, there is a performance penalty - not something I'm excited > about introducing into my web server. > I don't want to seem ungrateful - I am indebted to Jim, Kris, and the > rest of the AOLserver community for their fantastic work. I just hate > seeing good features go away. > Anyway, I will try to build AOLserver 4b2 on top of Cygwin sometime > soon. In the meantime, please email me if you are interested in > experimenting with this. > Thanks, > > Jamie > > > At 02:06 PM 11/8/2001 -0600, Rob Mayoff wrote: > > >This was discussed in the last weekly chat. Yes, the plan is to stop > >supporting Win32 in AOLserver. Reasons given, as I recall, were that it > >took a lot of Jim's time to implement/maintain and added significant > >complexity to some parts of the code, such as the threads package > >(especially since he's now considering supporting only pthreads, not > >other random proprietary threads APIs). > > > >A suggestion was floated that AOLserver could perhaps run on top of the > >cygwin package, which implements many Unix APIs and commands under > >Windows. If someone wishes to port AOLserver to run on cygwin, and it > >doesn't require many changes, then I suspect that Jim would accept > >the patches for that. >
