[bt-devel] [GnomeSword-developers] GnomeSword, Windows, and mingw

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
> Peter and Matthew -- not the apostles; rather, the folks who take part
> here in GS development, refdoc and ransom1982 -- have been cajoling me
> to put effort into porting GS to the native Windows world via mingw.
>
> To me, this is a huge undertaking.  I am decidedly not a Windows kinda
> guy -- I've lived in the land of UNIX and Linux since 1982 -- and once
> upon a time Cygwin was a minor mental breakthrough for me.  ("You screw
> around with the filesystem to give a false impression of /?  Ouch.")
>
> Are there others on this list who would be interested in helping pick up
> the gauntlet of moving GS into the native Windows environment?
>
>   

We live in interesting times :) BibleTime has already taken this path 
and we are relatively close to the goal though much is yet to be done. 
Independency from KDE is closer and closer. After that making it compile 
under Windows may or may not take much work. Probably it won't be too 
difficult because mingw is officially supported by Qt and actually comes 
with the Qt Windows development package.

We have also moved to cmake build system which I can wholeheartedly 
recommend over the old autotools.

One thing about your porting work remains unclear to me: are you going 
to abandon Gnome dependency as we are doing with KDE? Frankly said I 
don't see much advantage in KDE or Gnome for this kind of software. 
There are nowadays many desktop standards which can be directly used in 
Qt (and probably Gtk) so the user experience will be mostly the same. I 
have seen that the desktop library gives many convenient features for 
programmers but very little priceless.

> There is a small army of reasons for wanting to do this:
>
> - The existing Windows UI blows chunks, sucks dead worms through a
>   straw, and kicks dead whales down a beach.
>
>   
I have many times given my opinion about that, and I couldn't agree more.

> - The Sword Project as a whole suffers very badly at the hands of
>   reviewers when all they see is the Windows UI.  Like it or not, Linux
>   is a minority player.  No matter how cool and useful we developers of
>   GS, BT, and BD make our UIs, Windows is what reviewers see first --
>   often only.
>
>   
I agree.

> - Cygwin is really useful, but Cygwin usage is even more a minority
>   player than Linux: You have to [a] like the Linux environment, [b] be
>   stuck living in Windows, yet [c] choose to drag Linux-isms along.
>
>   

True - most people won't bother.
> - e-Sword just came out with its version 8, for which they are touting
>   their newfound belief in localization.  GS has been doing localization
>   for years!  Peter considers this (and so do I) an embarrassment -- we
>   are *so much more capable* than e-Sword.
>
>   
I guess Qt and Gtk are both actively maintained and developed, answering 
the needs of the modern global world. They are good for international 
usage and BibleTime developers have also seen i18n important for ages. I 
wonder if e-Sword can ever catch Sword-based software in this respect.

> - Again on the "like it or not" front...  Windows is where community is
>   most readily built.  Windows users represent easily an order of
>   magnitude more users than any other platform.
>   

That's very sadly painfully true, and I wait to gain both users and 
developers after BT works on Windows. Whoever comes there first benefits 
the other Sword based projects, too. Actually it may change the whole 
Crosswire community.

> I've been nearly alone on feature design and coding in GnomeSword for
> rather a long time.  Honestly, I need a break, I have other irons that I
> must put into the fire, but this is becoming clear as Something That
> Simply Must Be Done.  We must kill the Windows UI beast, or at least
> provide a really good alternative to it in a way that's natural to
> Windows users.
>
> Are there developers here who are actually willing to dedicate the time
> with me needed to do this, willing to engage the problem toward a
> solution, in a way that won't take a year to complete?
>   

Not me, I've got other things to do, and I'd rather ask people to join 
BibleTime :) But seriously, I hope we BT developers can be of some help. 
If you end up using the same tools we may give some advice or maybe you 
can even use the same workflows. We all should take care that the 
Windows compatibility is handled so that both programs follow the same 
conventions if applicable. For example the existing Sword applications 
and installations  should be respected and handled similarly when 
installing a new app. The possible NSIS installer could have the same 
workflow and UI if applicable.


--Eeli Kaikkonen