[sword-devel] Windows users as "poor cousins"?

[Chris Little]

Greg Hellings wrote:
> On another hand, one could also point out that autotools is native to 
> the SWORD library, is regularly updated when file names, directory 
> structures and the like change.  Thus, at any given point, a user could 
> just pull the SVN tree and have a very high probability of things "just 
> working."  The Windows build files are maintained manually -- nearly 
> every time I try to build from SVN on Windows (which is every 4-5 
> months, so not very regularly) thus far, I have had to edit the file 
> list, or find compiler directives and defines, etc that need to be 
> tweaked because of the manual system which does take a "poor cousin" 
> seat all too often.

Autotools, VC++, and BCB project files all need to be maintained 
manually. There is no substantive difference there.

I think you're conflating the BCB projects (which have always been 
maintained, and are almost always current in SVN) with the VC++ projects 
(which were not maintained at all in the last few years since the only 
projects using them were a few pet projects of mine that I've long 
considered defunct). Now that I'm building Win32 utilities binaries with 
VC++, the VC++ project files will be consistently current as well.

(As an aside, I noticed last week that some header files were absent 
from the autotools projects, so presumably the Linux camp was briefly 
the poor cousin, though I don't know that anyone was actually affected 
by this omission.)

> There are also file system paths on Windows which 
> had not been tested, then were found to mishandle unicode.  Last I 
> heard, this was not resolved -- though I understand that it works fine 
> in Linux.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that was an issue with Xiphos on 
Win32. I don't think BibleCS has any Unicode path issues.

> Add to that the fact that BibleCS is given a highly 
> pre-eminent position as "The SWORD Project for Windows" right off of the 
> main site, but it hasn't finished being updated to work with the latest 
> release of the library and definitely hasn't been released as such yet.

I'm unaware of any front end that has been updated to work with the 
particular feature of the latest release that is actually at issue here, 
viz. av11n. Other front ends have been released with 1.6.0 support 
lacking av11n, but since av11n is the most important feature to this 
thread (and the most significant feature of 1.6.0, IMO), there's not a 
significant advantage of Xiphos or BibleTime over BibleCS in this matter.


In summary, I don't think anyone needs to feel like a poor cousin. All 
of the project files should be equally well maintained now (or 
ill-maintained, depending on how you look at it). And everyone is in the 
same boat waiting for (or dreading the job of implementing) av11n 
support for their front end.

--Chris