On 13-11-13 02:30 AM, Lex Trotman wrote:
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How many "Geany on Windows" users are there? is it 90% POSIX/10% Windows? Or more? Less?
I'm a big fan of the "90% rule". If 90% of the users don't need/want it, don't implement or support it. Same goes for library versions: if 90%+ has GTK3, it's safe to require that.
Because Geany does not install spyware to see where it is used, we really don't know. :)
Various people make various guesses based on their personal experience, but really the people who know are only the users themselves.
I was thinking of asking on the users ML, after we agreed the questions here first. But do we want to?
It's a great idea but as you mentioned on IRC, we really have no way to know how representative subscribers to the users list are. For example maybe only X out of every X^Y Geany users subscribes to the mailing list, so even if we ask and N people say one thing, still the vast majority of users might be indifferent or completely disagree if they were asked/subscribed.
Are we looking for "market share"? Or are we interested in making the best software that suits the contributors, and if its useful to others fine?
Suiting the contributors/developers goes a long way in a project like Geany that is meant for users who themselves are also developers. What's more we have a mix of contributors on most popular *nix distros, Windows, even some using MacOS, and we all eat our own dogfood.
Thats a pretty deep and fundamental question about the project, what do those who are interested enough to monitor the dev list think?
My personal opinion is that in each new release we should try to support the then current versions of all platforms that our cross-platform toolkit allows us to support. I don't think we should do any more or less than that.
Cheers, Matthew Brush