[bt-devel] Windows installer tool choice (was: Re: Windows build system)

[Greg Hellings]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 11:42 PM, Eeli Kaikkonen
<eekaikko at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:
> Quoting Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com>:
>
> laptop.
>>
>> According to the latest statistics (February 2009) from
>> www.statowl.com, of the PC users out there 0.1% are using Windows ME,
>> 0.12% are using Windows 98.  Windows 95 doesn't even make the list,
>> which cuts off at those using less than 0.1% of the market share.
>> Even windows 2000 only gets 1.64% of the market share.  I have no
>> plans to bother with supporting them in my own work of building and
>> installing.  If you can get the source when it's packaged and build
>> it, that's all fine and good but 0.22% of PC users doesn't really
>> bother me.
>>
>
> Your opinion is quite odd, because according to the same page Linux has
> 0.65% market share. To be logical we could then drop off the Linux support.

Linux is the origin and source of the program, it is also a current
and still available operating system.  No new effort is required to
move the program into Linux, since that is where it is most stable and
already available.  On the other hand, building for Windows 9x would
require additional work, time and finagling that I don't want to put
into the system.  Especially if what Matthew says is true and support
for those is already excluded based on using Visual Studio 2005, then
it's even more work for me to find a version of Studio that will
build, possibly buy it for a large sum of money if it's not one of the
two versions I already own, then learn how to build binaries that will
work on both 9x and NT families of Windows.

In short, I'm not suggesting dropping support for something we already
have support for and other people are doing.  I'm saying that I don't
want to go through more effort to support a market share that is 1/3
the size of Linux's, presumably decreasing as time goes forward and
which could possibly reduce future functionality that would otherwise
be available with features only available on NT-families of Windows.
If we get it for free with NSIS, which seems unlikely, then I'm
happier.  If we don't get it, I don't want to try and work extra hard
to get it.

--Greg

>
> --Eeli Kaikkonen
>
>
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