Today, I’m announcing the beginning of a project that intends to bring a little joy into the hearts of Open Source aficionados on the Windows Platform.The biggest challenge to using/building/maintaining many Open Source applications on Windows, is that Windows does a lot of things differently than Linux and Unix . Different filesystems, command lines, APIs, user experiences … well, pretty much everything. Regardless of personal opinions about it being the ‘right-way’ or ‘wrong-way’, it suffices to say that it is just simply different. In order to build an Open Source application like PHP for Windows from scratch, I need to have a collection of libraries created from a fair number of different projects. This creates a dependency between the code that I’m working on—PHP—and the project that supplies the library that I need. It’s pretty important that I not simply rely upon a previously compiled version of the library (provided either by the project itself, or a third party) for a number of reasons: * I want to make sure that the library is compiled with the same version of the compiler and libraries as I use.
* In order to fine-tune performance, I’m going to need to change the compiler settings.
* As a security precaution against malicious third parties creating flawed binaries.
* Hey!--It’s Open source. It’s pretty much a moral imperative that I compile the code for myself. Well, it is for me anyway.Now, unfortunately, those dependencies don’t necessarily share the same development environments, practices, tools, operating systems, or even ideas as to how things should—from one’s own perspective—be done (because, as every developer knows, one’s own way is the ‘one true way’). Interestingly, this problem really doesn’t happen on Linux (and other *NIX-like substances). When someone builds that same application (PHP) on Unix, they do so knowing that the OS works a certain way (generally speaking), and along with the dark magic known as autoconf, you can put the source code on nearly any Unix-variant and just build it. Read more: Garrett Serack: Open Source Development at Microsoft
* In order to fine-tune performance, I’m going to need to change the compiler settings.
* As a security precaution against malicious third parties creating flawed binaries.
* Hey!--It’s Open source. It’s pretty much a moral imperative that I compile the code for myself. Well, it is for me anyway.Now, unfortunately, those dependencies don’t necessarily share the same development environments, practices, tools, operating systems, or even ideas as to how things should—from one’s own perspective—be done (because, as every developer knows, one’s own way is the ‘one true way’). Interestingly, this problem really doesn’t happen on Linux (and other *NIX-like substances). When someone builds that same application (PHP) on Unix, they do so knowing that the OS works a certain way (generally speaking), and along with the dark magic known as autoconf, you can put the source code on nearly any Unix-variant and just build it. Read more: Garrett Serack: Open Source Development at Microsoft