Re: Windows support (was: Pissed Off)

Ed & Robert,
Interesting exchanges re/ Windows and Emusic and
complaints, etc.  I for one have not had any problems
with Zinf crashing (I'm a WinXP user) or with
Emusic...other than making the mistake of giving them
my Thailand address.  That means I can't download a
lot of the music that "due to licensing restrictions
is not available outside North America".
At any rate, I hope you guys wait until Emusic's new
download manager is fully functional if/when you drop
windows support.
Thanks for your help.
Sincerely,
Jim C.
--- Ed Sweetman <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Given this latest feedback, I think I should've
> gone with my old idea of
> > dropping the windows support altogether and simply
> continue the player
> > as a Linux only player. 
> > 
> > Hey Ed, wanna drop Windows support? 
> 
> Dropping windows support has a couple major
> advantages I'll mention.
> 
> 1.  We can fix the config/make system that some
> package maintainers have 
> complained about and it makes the tree easier to
> deal with by reducing 
> it by more than half the number of directories and
> code.
> 
> 2.  We dont have to deal with bugs from a port that
> nobody wants to keep 
>   up to date with the more developed unix version.
> 
> 
> For the most part as far as i can see the code for
> these two OS's are 
> separate.  We've basically got two programs sharing
> some similar files 
> but for the most part are entirely separate.  That
> is our main problem 
> with why the windows port works so much less than
> the unix port.  The 
> lack of shared code.  The gui and ui is entirely
> separate and that's a 
> big problem with maintainance.
> 
> 
> A couple disadvantages with dropping windows...
> 1. We leave windows and it's userbase.  Whether
> that's good or bad i'm 
> not sure but i've always felt being able to run on
> as many OS's as 
> possible is best if you can do it with ease.
> 
> 2.  A lot of what is left of the interest in zinf
> comes from emusic.  A 
> lot of emusic users are windows users.  By leaving
> the windows OS we 
> leave that "advertising" and with that may come less
> interest and less 
> interest means any programmers out there wont be
> compelled to want to be 
> a zinf developer.
> 
> 
> Now there are some obvious faults with the
> disadvantages.  I've never 
> even been to emusic's website so that cuts some big
> holes in the "no 
> advertising" to windows argument.  Also, despite
> being visible to the 
> huge windows  community, we've gotten hardly any
> programming interest 
> from it.  Also, developing on windows to make the
> project compile is a 
> pain in the ass because we either have to deal with
> cygwin or VC and the 
> very nature of windows makes this kind of project
> have to have a large 
> quantity of duplicated functionality and thus
> separate code.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > EMusic will roll out their download manager soon,
> and I've changed the
> > handled mime type and removed the calls to the
> Jukebox that handles
> > pass-offs of unhandled RMP types. That should
> improve the stability of
> > the window version, I think. I'll put that out as
> version 2.2.1 in the
> > next week or so, and then we can wipe the windows
> code from the
> > codebase. 
> > 
> > Whaddya think?
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> it's not practical to keep a port that requires so
> much work but nobody 
> from that platform wants to do it. The next version
> of zinf has always 
> been to cut dead weight from zinf, to remove the
> code that doesn't work 
> in favor of trying to hack it to make it work. 
> While i dont think there 
> will never be a windows port of zinf, i think it's
> best to remove the 
> port we do have now and if people want one work can
> be started on a 
> clean slate and done correctly.
> 
> So to sum it up, I say remove the windows port. 
> Remove the bug reports 
>   related to it. We then remove the bulk of the
> problems with zinf that 
> are reported and can get to the real problems with
> zinf that have to be 
> dealt with before the next release. That and things
> being more managable 
>   may lead to less programmers being scared away
> from the project.
> 
> 
> 
>
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