Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/11/01/07:07:59
On Fri, 30 Oct 1998, Mike Ruskai wrote:
> >A moderately naive Windows user would have no reason to expect that they
> >would not be enabled, and simply become confused when it didn't work.
> >RTFM'ing might help, but then, if people would RTFM, we'd be out of a
> >job :)
>
> I humbly submit that the world has been a service when such a user is denied
> the opportunity to infect humanity with object code created from his/her
> source.
I humbly move to disagree. DJGPP is not a vehicle of judging people's
merits and rewarding or punishing them as we see fit. IMHO, DJGPP
should be usable by most of the people who want to program on a PC
that runs MS-DOS-compatible systems. If we begin to judge one
another, we will end up sparring with each other instead of helping
each other.
> Maybe this seems elitist to some, but I think it's entirely reasonable to
> expect that a person a computer literate before attempting to become a
> computer programmer.
It is reasonable to expect that, but the question is: what do you do
when the real people out there don't live up to your expectations? Do
you tell them they didn't pass the exam, and therefore will be
deprived of DJGPP? Sorry, I don't subscribe to this kind of
``solution'', and I don't think many others will.
> The basic point here is that the package relies on identical conditions when
> unarchiving and compiling. This presents a problem for individuals like
> myself who habitually use a native interface for manipulating files
> (including archives), and for any individual who may wish to involve a
> network that makes using long filenames impossible.
It is possible; it just requires a bit more effort to set it up (see
my other message for the details). I agree that it would be mighty
nice if these problems were to go away, but since this is in essense
Microsoft's bug (I mean the numeric tails misfeature), it also doesn't
have easy automatic solutions.
> FWIW, I never found anything in any documentation indicating that the archive
> was packaged in such a way as to make these problems possible. It may very
> well be in the documentation somewhere, but it would take less time to figure
> the problem out than find it, if my experience is any indication.
So what's your point? If a problem is so easy to solve that you
didn't even have to read the docs, then the problem itself is probably
not that grave, either, right?
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