[Geany-Devel] On Deprecation of Platforms

[Matthew Brush]

On 13-10-03 07:37 AM, Lex Trotman wrote:
> On 3 October 2013 23:19, Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org>wrote:
>
>> [...]
>
>>
>> Anyway, although I agree the Windows version isn't as good as it should
>> right now, I don't really see the problem it causes to the rest of
>> Geany.  And if we indeed clean some things up a little like Matthew
>> suggests, it could even be just fine (Windows dialogs, come on).
>>
>
> Again, the issue is, without anybody to do it, all that happens is that the
> rest of Geany gets less love.
>

I'll do it, as long as it doesn't involve endless bikeshedding on the 
mailing list over minute details of each change ... which I guess means 
I won't do it :)

> Lots of people over the years have put forward suggestions, but none of
> them have even dropped a PR or patch, let alone assisted with maintenance.
>   Its not nice to cut off a platform, but if everybody expects others to do
> the work, then we may have no choice or the whole project will collapse.
>

The end is nigh! :)

> I'm not saying delete anything inside #ifdef OS_WIN32 tomorrow.  But also
> in fairness some warning that platform specific code is not being
> maintained adequately needs to be given to Windows users, and their help
> sought, and this is one way I can think of that makes it clear.  Other
> suggestions are welcome :)
>

We should delete as much #ifdef G_OS_WIN32 code as possible as soon as 
possible, IMO. All of that code is superfluous since we use a 
(reasonably) cross-platform toolkit, all it does is adds more places for 
bugs to hide, more work to maintain it, and as mentioned none of the 
developers even wants to touch it. Aside from the build/release process, 
which does need some love currently, there should be next to no extra 
work involved in having Geany work on supported platforms.

My $0.02

P.S. Out of curiosity, if you had to guess, how many of those 10% of 
Windows bugs on the tracker are related to "special" win32 code vs. 
regular old cross-platform code-paths that we all use on other platforms 
daily?

Cheers,
Matthew Brush