[Geany-Devel] On Deprecation of Platforms

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 03.10.2013 02:19, schrieb Lex Trotman:
> All Developers,
>
> Its time we deprecated windows support!!

It's not. See other's replies and my points below. I should mentioned 
that I do use Geany on Windows at work successfully. I don't use it to 
build/compile so the process spawning bug doesn't affect me.

>
> The windows code in Geany is:
>
> - unmaintained and bit-rotting

It's not as actively maintained as the Linux code. However the current 
state is *working*. Why drop support for a working platform if it's 
mostly working? It's not like it's costing us anything at the moment.

>
> - buggy

Not significantly more buggy than the Linux version. The most prominent 
problem is the process spawning which doesn't handicap Geany's main 
purpose: editing source code. I don't know about a bug that is so severe 
that it requires immediate action.

>
> - holding us at an unreasonably old GTK version

As others have mentioned, this is not true. LTS distros are. Windows has 
a more recent stable GTK release since a while. The problem is that the 
installers are still generated with the old one. Who can fix this? Are 
the scripts for this in Git?

>
> - hard to maintain due to being hacks on top of hacks
>
> - few of the developers have access to a representative development 
> setup (no WinXP on a VM is hardly representative)

You can also do (limited) testing with Wine. It doesn't even need a 
Windows license.

Best regards.