From: Eli Green Date: 2001-10-31T20:05:01+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:23932] Re: New RubyGarden Poll: Windows support I think you'll find that the biggest problem is that the list does not seem to be very Windows-user heavy. People with copies of MSVC and the knowledge to make Ruby work nice under it (currently, it does not ... it does some bloody strange things, like sleep briefly after EVERY syscall ... *shudder*). Note that I'm not arguing for or against MSVC or MinGW. I'm just playing Devil's advocate in this instance. As you came very close to pointing out, people are not used to having to compile things for their Windows platforms -- they're used to binary installers. This is all very good and well, but this puts the onus on module builders to get their modules compiled for Windows and to provide the binary packages. So all of a sudden, people need copies of MSVC again. Dang! Catch-22! Binary distribution is something RubyGems should keep in mind. :) What will probably happen, given the current results of the poll, is that whoever actually rolls up his sleeves and does the port will use MinGW or MSVC based on personal preference. So really, the best thing would be for you to finish the port and clean it up. :) from Furio Filoseta Tlf on 2001-10-31 at 05:26:16: > Is it REALLY that important to have a free option under Windows ? > > The way I see it, and at least for application development, most Win > developers have access to Visual Studio, so VC should be fine. Be fair, > is there anyone doing Ruby innerworking on Windows that doesn't have > Visual Studio ? Is really Ruby the ONLY Win project they work with ? > > Adopting VC would make tons of sense to the non-MS zealots, since they > would be able to brag about how Ruby is totally free on Linux, BSD, etc. > but NOT under Windows, evil MS Windows. They of course would forget to > mention that USING Ruby would still be free, and that it would only cost > you if you wanted to tamper with Ruby itself. Not that many people > really do that... -- Eli Green