[. . .]
I think that this discussion has really degenerated into a long advocacy *against* everything that open source is good for.
Alexandre's take seems to be that one should simply ignore what's out there and program like in Win 2.x days. In the meantime, software has moved forward quite a bit. That's what I make out of it.
snip
Doing it in "plain C and Win32" implies reimplementing all this otherwise irrelevant stuff. It shifts focus from the goal to the means, by having to develop your own tools. E.g. C++ library is just a tool (means) that helps you to write your application (the goal). I just don't get the argument that developing a contemporary GUI application should be done such that all the tools have to be redone from scratch, as that's what Alexandre's way of doing things implies.
here! here!
Thank you!
Shifting the "goal to the means" is what I meant by;
'These issues may serve to deter a developer from taking on the project with a view to "I'm not getting my hands on that train wreck".'
It seems lunacy to ignore tools which are available in favor of a non existent accepted "Alexandre doesn't want it" rhetoric, I always thought open source was about community, and discussing the advantages of one language over another is irrelevant when it comes down to the fact in about 2 weekends worth of actual work I have a nice looking well rounded app, which is well on its way to the full functionality _I_ want out of it, regardless of any other users. I am of course releasing it GNU GPL so others have the benefit of this. I don't know any C win32 programmers which could do what I've done so far in ~380 lines of python.
Lets remember that open source is about, sharing and freedom, sharing ideas as well as software, and giving people freedom to put their own contributions in, and use software how they like. It is not about restricting what functionality is available to users by restricting the programmers. Remember please that the dependencies of pygtk/pyglade do not influence the core of wine, they aren't important to the internals and have no affect on it whatsoever. In this respect it is a completely different animal to fontforge.
I would like wine doors to be included in the wine distribution, but that is not to say I think its necessary. Think of, file-roller. This tool doesn't come bundled with tar, rar, zip, bzip and gzip. It is merely a user interface which uses these tools.
As far as I'm concerned the only thing I want out of the wine community is a series of enhancements and changes to the AppDB in order to provide the functionality I need for my application. Once I have some semblance of an application ready for distribution I will then download the source to the AppDB make the changes myself and hopefully get those changes accepted into CVS and eventually onto the site. However if this fails to occur then I will fund out of my own pocket a server and the other resources necessary to run this service in the hopes that wine users will contribute financially to ensure its survival.
K,