From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2006-07-22T03:52:17+09:00
Subject: Re: One-Click Installer: MinGW? or VC2005?

Hello Tanner,


TB> What happens when VC2k5 goes the way of VC6?  What happens when we can no
TB> longer acquire VC2k5 and Microsoft has moved on to their new VC2k7fx3
TB> product, with new features, new tool chain, and different compatibility
TB> problems?  How long until MS changes the licensing, or distribution of their
TB> toolchain in such a way that we have to move to either an open source
TB> option, or to the newest MS provided solution? 6 months? A year? 3 years?
TB> We don't know, and we can't do anything to stop them.

How long until we have a maintainer dispute in the MinGW team? If this
happens we can move on. A new installer version will come at least about
every year, maybe 6 month. So we can change. It's not something we write
in stone.

And this decision is also a little enforcement to the extension maintainers
to provide a msvc compatible build process.

The problems and danger are comming IMHO from the gnu/gcc side of darkness.

Ruby still suffers in plattform independence because to much is done
on unix boxes and ignorance about windows issues among the developers
is high. The "win32.c" already has to much code that shows that people
don't have any understanding about the windows plattform
(take "Kernel::system" for example).

TB> The current MSYS+MinGW can't be pulled out from underneath us, ever.  I
TB> greatly dislike the idea of relying on ANY non-open product to provide the
TB> prodominent Windows distribution of Ruby.  You obviously disagree, and
TB> that's completely within your right to do.  I also know you've put in a lot
TB> of work to try to get VC2k5 to compile Ruby and its dependencies, which is a
TB> great thing, and many of us appreciate the choice that that work can bring.
TB> But I also know that today, in under 10 minutes I download MSYS+MinGW + Ruby
TB> Source, and had it compiled and running test scripts.

You see we already have this problem that the Ruby Core team is not
keeping both major systems upto date. I would really start to worry if we
now also move to a gcc compiler. This is not good.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's