I was asked to forward this here from gnomesword-developers. Opinion, suggestion, counterpoint, and offers of help welcome.
--karl
--- Begin Message ---Peter and Matthew -- not the apostles; rather, the folks who take part here in GS development, refdoc and ransom1982 -- have been cajoling me to put effort into porting GS to the native Windows world via mingw. To me, this is a huge undertaking. I am decidedly not a Windows kinda guy -- I've lived in the land of UNIX and Linux since 1982 -- and once upon a time Cygwin was a minor mental breakthrough for me. ("You screw around with the filesystem to give a false impression of /? Ouch.") Are there others on this list who would be interested in helping pick up the gauntlet of moving GS into the native Windows environment? There is a small army of reasons for wanting to do this: - The existing Windows UI blows chunks, sucks dead worms through a straw, and kicks dead whales down a beach. - The Sword Project as a whole suffers very badly at the hands of reviewers when all they see is the Windows UI. Like it or not, Linux is a minority player. No matter how cool and useful we developers of GS, BT, and BD make our UIs, Windows is what reviewers see first -- often only. - Cygwin is really useful, but Cygwin usage is even more a minority player than Linux: You have to [a] like the Linux environment, [b] be stuck living in Windows, yet [c] choose to drag Linux-isms along. - Cygwin is sluggish. It works fine, but the emulation layer is slow. - e-Sword just came out with its version 8, for which they are touting their newfound belief in localization. GS has been doing localization for years! Peter considers this (and so do I) an embarrassment -- we are *so much more capable* than e-Sword. - Again on the "like it or not" front... Windows is where community is most readily built. Windows users represent easily an order of magnitude more users than any other platform. I've been nearly alone on feature design and coding in GnomeSword for rather a long time. Honestly, I need a break, I have other irons that I must put into the fire, but this is becoming clear as Something That Simply Must Be Done. We must kill the Windows UI beast, or at least provide a really good alternative to it in a way that's natural to Windows users. Are there developers here who are actually willing to dedicate the time with me needed to do this, willing to engage the problem toward a solution, in a way that won't take a year to complete? mildly desperate, --karl
--- End Message ---
_______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: [email protected] http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
