David Haslam wrote:
I think those of us who are Windows users are regarded as "poor cousins" by some CrossWire programmers. :confused:
I think you may have that somewhat backwards. CrossWire itself makes its source code available for download to everyone with Internet access, Linux and Windows and OS X and *BSD users, alike. Whatever OS you choose to use, you are free to compile those sources for your chosen OS, and use the resulting binary libraries and utilities.
For Windows users, *only*, Crosswire also offers binaries for download. Sometimes out of date, it seems, but at least it does offer them -- something it does not do for any Linux or FreeBSD users :) This an *additional* priviledge, a luxury offered *only* to Windows users.
Similarly, there are projects at Crosswire such as "BibleCS" (aka the SWORD Project for Windows) which are "Windows-only". I don't know of any Crosswire software projects that are "Linux-only" or "FreeBSD-only".
How does Crosswire going out of its way to do extra things for Windows users make such users in any sense "poor cousins" in this context?
While there is currently an established and somewhat successful small team (independent of, but created at the request of, Crosswire) doing official Debian and Ubuntu Linux packaging, there does not seem to be a similar team doing Windows packaging of SWORD and its applications. But I don't see how that lack of a packaging team is really the fault of the Crosswire programmers!
Highly unofficially, Matthew Talbert and I have recently discussed and begun some work on creating a way to set up a (free) Windows development environment with which to compile and install SWORD (and hopefully later also SWORD applications such as Xiphos and BibleTime). That work is in its very early days, and right now what is published is basically a proof of concept that quickly gets you a working C/C++ development environment, but does not (yet?) download/ configure/ compile/ install SWORD or the libraries that SWORD depends upon.
See http://crosswire.org/~jmarsden/setup-mingw.html for the current public state of that project. It is not currently of any use to non-programmers, and is not really intended for use by non-programmers even when (if!) it is completed -- non-programmers and C++ compilers don't mix, and should not *have* to mix :)
Lastly: Virtualization cuts both ways! Just as Linux users can run Windows in a virtual machine within the comfort and convenience of Linux, Windows users can run Linux in a virtual machine within Windows. VirtualBox OSE (for example) is free software that can allow this; so other than the cost of licencing the Windows OS itself, there is no economic cost to this kind of "just do both" approach -- other than the availability of a reasonably modern PC, and your time to understand it and set it up. This is not a "programmers only" concept, any confident Windows user with a modern PC could make use of it.
Jonathan _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
