Hi Roberto,
If your goal is to supply a compact package for users,
IMO you should simply just not include Harbour itself
and mingw, but rather simply install into existing Harbour
install and provide links to Harbour installer to users.
Because Harbour distribution is not compact :)
Well, it's 40-50MB. Probably we can find places and users in
the world where this sounds like a huge package, but even
a required (and reasonable) C compiler is much bigger than
that, not to mention other tools used these days. So I assume
a software developer in 2009 is able to deal with it in some ways.
Notice that it's possible to create a light Harbour
installer pkg, but it turned out to be much less successful
in previous tests, so we've dropped it. But all this only
influence download times, installed size can be easily
tweaked by users.
And it goes against other of the HMG principles: To be easy to use
and install.
We haven't been talking about bug reports, we've been talking
Sorry, I was talking about that.
Than it must have been a misunderstanding on your part.
I reckon it's very nice for HMG if Harbour bug reports
can be passed "as is" to Harbour development list, but
originally we've been also talking about the other way
round: HMG forums can as well help in _general Harbour
issues_. Please reread original messages, so we're
talking on common ground.
> So if a user comes by and says, "I've installed HMG and I'd like
to create a hello world app, how can I do it?", Someone could say:
"type hbmk2 hello.prg". User won't know what I'm talking about.
Instead he will find a COMPILE.BAT, which no Harbour developer
knows anything about.
So, to make this possible, HMG (as it is currently) should dissaper
to be transformed in a folder in Harbour contrib?
Not a contrib, but an "add on". Technically they are
similar, but contribs are part of Harbour SVN, while
"add ons" are 3rd party packages, developed outside
Harbour. Notice the name "add on" can be changed to anything,
it just so happens I've personally chose that, thinking it's
a positive name.
If you look at any serious development packages, which
also had much wider acceptance than Harbour, they all
use such approach. This has a multitude of advantages.
I will not do that.
I'd be interested in reason.
IMO that's a pity and if this seems to be the approach
from most Harbour package developers, Harbour's future is
almost surely deemed to slow death. That's of course my
opinion only, albeit quite a strong one.
Only an open, modular approach, with well separated
components can make Harbour a *platform*, where each
component is easy to plug together in any combination,
and be developed separately. This was the spirit of
CA-Cl*pper. This was in fact one of the key to its success,
and this is also true to the Harbour spirit.
[ Can you imaging a Clipper add-on package which bundled
Clipper with itself, and the two could only be used together,
not with other tools? ]
Notice that above modular approach is used by quite some
popular development platform. Just to name a few:
PYTHON, RUBY, PERL.
Just install any of them and see.
Now with HMG, you force users to install a parallel
Harbour universe in C:\hmg dir (which is also fixed, due
to .bat based build system with hardcoded paths).
This is great for everyone who feels fine to use your
own Harbour universe *only*, but it closes out every
other libs from this world and it closes out every user
with a real Harbour installation from using HMG in
the normal and easy way.
Harbour's user base is pretty small, and above tactics
*slices* existing user base to even smaller communities
*without connection* to the others. Smaller communities
have less chance to survive and they are much less able
to contribute to Harbour in general.
HMG is a set of addon libs to Harbour, so technically
there is little reason to create a parallel universe.
(of course you save yourself any sort of support headaches,
which could be caused by using external libs, but there
is a high price to pay)
Usually all bug analysis start with getting to know how the app
was built, and many time the build process is at fault, or it
can even create strange results very difficult to anticipate.
I have not your knowledge about Harbour, but I think that using
exactly the same compiler and libraries is very unlikely that such
thing happens .
Well, I have. Having spent quite some years seeing thousands
of problem reports I can assure you this is very likely to
happen. First problem is definition of "exactly the same".
Now it's exactly the same, but after a release it won't be,
so it will an never ending catch me if you can game and a
never ending syncing effort.
Brgds,
Viktor
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