And here I thought dt windows bikeshedding was explained to death[1][2] and over :(
The problem is *not* building under windows. The problem is maintaining it. What *all* the people trying to bring dt to windows have been doing so far is called packaging, at best. As an example, thus far, no one has actually talked to us directly, did not try to contribute windows-related fixes/changes for 1.6.x version back into darktable. We are working on darktable in our free time, of pure fun and interest. There is no money involved. Thus, darktable, being available for some bigger circle of/to more users does not help *us* at ALL. It *ONLY* hurts us: 1. More users => more bugreports, while amount of developers stays constant. 2. The more darktable is popular, the bigger the chances of next person to use it being less skilled in at least basic debugging than the average dt user before that. That, unfortunately, even includes uploading /tmp/darktable_bt_XXXXXX.txt... Not all users do that :( 3. !!! Every new big chunk of "market" is always a minefield at start, e.g.: https://redmine.darktable.org/issues/10541 That bug is probably very simple, but no one of us uses a distribution with musl libc, so no one can debug it, so it stays there, dormant... 4. Also, did you know that on windows, our automatic backtrace creation would not even work, so even getting backtrace would be harder than usual? Now, imagine, how much of those bugs will be from windows? None of us uses windows, for various reasons, so we are of little help there. Of course, if there is a VERY large demand, one can do it, but ONLY for some money as paid builds. Thus, before darktable can be made available to any new big "market", there needs to be a person, whom we trust to be capable in handling all of the aspects of maintaining darktable there. (For a normal UNIX/BSD/Linux distribution, package maintainer is an obvious answer, in most cases.) So, what exactly do we mean by a maintainer? 0. Be actively involved with darktable for some time. At least half a year. That means: *) Stick with us in IRC. *) actually know the code. *) actively examine bugreports, fix bugs. 1. Be reliable and trustworthy [over that time], and more importantly, make us believe in that. Once 1. and 2. are complete, there is some room to discuss possibility of making official darktable windows port and becoming it's maintainer. IMPORTANT: ANY OTHER APPROACH TO DARKTABLE ON WINDOWS CAN AND WILL BE CONSIDERED HOSTILE, HAPPENING AGAINST OUR WILL AND ACTIVELY HURTING DARKTABLE PROJECT. [1] https://www.darktable.org/2015/07/why-dont-you-provide-a-windows-build/comment-page-1/#comment-46412 [2] https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-on-windows-parthas-build-thread/290 Roman. Also signed by Tobias. ___________________________________________________________________________ darktable developer mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org
