[Python-Dev] Building on Windows (was Re: A "new" kind of leak)

[Aahz]

On Sat, Apr 13, 2002, Tim Peters wrote:
>
> I think it took about 4x longer than it would have *just* to fix it in the
> head.  This surprised me.  In retrospect, though, it doesn't:  obviously,
> there's twice as much of everything (twice as many checkins to do, twice as
> many files to edit, twice as many tests to run, etc), and there's no
> "economy of scale".  But it's worse than just that, because there are
> endless little costs switching between them, and especially on Windows where
> I use a GUI to build (and have to poke around finding the right project file
> to load), and changing directories in a DOS box is clumsy, and I also wanted
> an additional Cygwin shell to try to apply a patch, generated on the trunk,
> to the 2.2 branch.  Trying to switch among all these things while the
> time-consuming parts are running, in different parts of the process on
> different branches, quickly leads to mistakes, and then there's extra time
> to recover from those.  There's also an urge to try to copy collateral text
> (checkin notes, NEWS) from one branch to the other, and so more little files
> get created to effect the transfer.

Yup, this is precisely why I never considered trying to do serious dev
work on Windows.  I think this kind of thing is much more amenable to
automation on Unixes, but I also think the NT-class OSes do better, too.
Have you considered switching to Win2K for your dev work and just testing
under Win98?  To what extent do you think you could automate things using
Python and WSH?  What about using multiple dekstops to keep projects
straight?

[I'm leaving this on python-dev for the moment, because I think we
should all know what it takes to keep Windows viable.]
-- 
Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

What if there were no rhetorical questions?