Re: [DotGNU]'best damned development environment'

[Barry Fitzgerald]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Norbert Bollow wrote:

> > Some suggestions for this software:
> > -is support for non-GNU absolutely required? answer me
>
> No.  For the development environment, it's good enough when it
> runs on GNU/Linux and other variants of the GNU system.  With
> other words, we should not worry about making it work on other
> systems, but writing code in a reasonably portable manner is
> always a good idea, and we'd be happy to accept patches that
> help make it work on non-GNU systems.  In fact even those parts
> of DotGNU which for strategic reasons we need to make work on
> proprietary systems (specifically, this is SEE and any browser
> plugins that we might want to create) can mostly be developed
> under GNU/Linux.  This should probably be the "recommended" way
> for working on developing these things, and much of the testing
> can be done with WINE.
>
> (For these things, we may need help from people who are
> experienced in developing for the Microsoft Windows platform,
> and the code for these things needs to be portable enough that
> it can be compiled and debugged with the tools that these
> developers are used to.  So again I don't see an absolute need
> for the 'ultimative DotGNU development environment' to run on
> the Microsoft Windows platform.)
>

I want to add to this that it may be necessary, for the same reasons, to
port any runtime environments (Free runtime environments, obviously) to
other platforms.  SEE itself will need the ported runtime environments to
run the portable code.  This could be very complex, but would
strategically useful.

GNU/Linux support should be the priority, but we should keep Microsoft
Windows and other platform ports on the list - for the sake of
marketshare and trying to bring people over to our platform and then
bring them to GNU/Linux. :)

        -Barry