[Geany] Geany as Windoze noob's learning tool

[Enrico Tröger]

On 11/08/12 04:43, Ma Xiaojun wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 1:59 AM, Laurent Hoeltgen <hoeltgman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> No, shipping a compiler with Geany wouldn't make sense. Geany is general
>> purpose editor. You can use it for many things. HTML, Ruby, gnu octave,
>> gnuplot or even just plain text. None of these require a compiler.
> That's true.
> But since Windoze don't always use /usr/bin, the PATH setting is
> always annoying and challenging for noobs.
> I got your point though, a MinGW bundled version, if any, may not
> become "official".

I'd like to add my 2cents as well:

including a Mingw distribution into Geany's official installer won't
happen, for various reasons.

First, Geany is just an IDE or text editor or something between.
Its job is to help users writing code, not to provide everything to get
it compiling/running, especially because Geany supports not only C but
also many many more languages.
Setting up an environment capable of compiling/running/debugging code
was, is and will be the responsibility of the user because only he knows
what she needs and wishes.
You are speaking multiple times of "noobs". I think less advanced users
need a tutorial how to setup a dev environment. They don't need a huge
installer with everything in. That would maybe ease installation but
won't help understanding what's going on. And then, from my experience,
users who want to learn a programming language, especially a language
like C, are not that noobish anymore. They should know how to install a
program or how to unpack an archive into a specific path.


Then, if we would include Mingw for C development, then Python users
will arrive and request inclusion of a Python runtime, then the Perl
guys, PHP, Ruby, ...
The installer would end up in a 3 GB file with everything included.

Another reason is that it might raise licensing questions when bundling
different runtime environments of various languages into one installer,
even if they are all Free Software.


To sum it up:
the Geany installer won't get a bundled Mingw or whatever environment
built into.
However, as others said before, if anyone wants to do that as a
contribution, that is welcome.

Regards,
Enrico

P.S.: Generally it helps to use the correct names of software components
in the public, even if you don't like them (which is also true for me
and probably many others) but still using something like "Windoze" might
create a wrong impression of how serious you are about the whole topic.

-- 
Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.asc

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