[GRASS-dev] WinGRASS Wiki Hacking

[Glynn Clements]

Paolo Cavallini wrote:

> > > > given the minority status of Windows amongst
> > > > GRASS users and (especially) developers, as there's always a risk that
> > > > the Windows specific parts won't get updated and/or tested regularly
> > > > enough.
> > > 
> > > Do you have hard evidence of this? This is not my impression these days.
> > 
> > Who, other than you, is working on the Windows version regularly?
> 
> I'm not working on Windows since 2000.

Oops; I mistook you for Marco, who has been working on Windows (and
who started this thread). Sorry.

> I agree that GRASS developers are Linux-based, and probably also many (most?) power users.
> On the other hand, I think regular users are more evenly spread across OSs, I believe.
> So having thorough testing for win and mac is mostly a matter of having fresh packages for those OS.
> For this, it would be feasible to set up an automatic packaging running daily from SVN?

I don't know. We would need a Windows system that can be dedicated to
this task, and someone would need to figure out how to run the batch
job and upload the results.

Even then, I'm not sure how many Windows users would download SVN
snapshots. It doesn't help that they would probably see more problems
than Linux users (most changes are made on Linux, and only get tested
on Linux prior to being committed), or that they wouldn't get the same
level of support (there are fewer Windows developers, and those that
exist generally don't understand Windows as well as the Linux
developers understand Linux).

OTOH, simply compiling daily snapshots on Windows would catch
compile-time errors, even if no-one downloads the binaries.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>