[tomboy-list] I'm a little confused...

[Davyd McColl]

Please, bear with me here -- this may come across as a little ranty. I'm
just very confused about something.

Tomboy Notes is a great piece of software. It's convenient, it's smart, it
doesn't get in the way. Best of all, it's cross-platform. At least, it's
/supposed to be/.

As far as I can tell, one of the greatest motivators for chosing .NET/Mono
would be the platform agnosticism. Actually, being a little facetious here,
I can't come up with another good reason to go that route, especially with a
project that has its roots in a *nix world. Not that I'm advocating using a
different language/library/platform/whatever. A tool for a task, I say, and
if you can accomplish your task neatly with tool X, then why should I care
that you're not using tool Y? The answer is that I don't. Even though .NET
provides performance penalties (I could elaborate, but I'm trying to remain
less ranty).

I'm not another Stallman who thinks that Mono must be evil because of its
ties to .NET and That Other Operating System. Nay, I choose to run Ubuntu at
home (for many reasons) and have to run Windows 7 at work. Again, a tool for
a task. Our client software is Windows-based, so it kinda makes sense that a
lot of dev happens in Windows. What really made my propeller-beanie spin was
that I could finally stop emailing myself with bright ideas that I had at
home or notes for home-time from work. I could just put it in a note and use
Ubuntu One to sync my notes. Masterful!

A day or two ago, I had a bug, which, as a good user, I reported and which
has been fixed, apparently (
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624885)

What bothers me about the .NET/Mono choice is simply this: despite the fact
that choosing .NET/Mono as a platform would seem to make x-platform releases
part of the cycle, despite the fact that there is a win32 installer (1.3.2,
quite far behind the curve: some digging shows that there are a 1.4 releases
and a new 1.5 release out). At least, these releases are available as
source, which is great and all, but bear in mind that most win32 users don't
have a *nix build environment. In fact, most win32 users are starved of
*any* kind of dev tools, though I suppose they could download Monodevelop
and friends (or VS2008 and the gtk-sharp stuff, I suppose) and work with
that. A tad of an overkill for a 2.5mb install-size app to have to go get
all of that, but it's possible. What would make it more difficult though is
that the project is set up in good old Makefiles and a configure script.
Easy on *nix, NOT HAPPENING on win32. I tried. For one thing, my win32 build
of sh can't fork(), though I'm sure that's the least of my problems. Again,
perhaps I could work around this with Cygwin, but that's also quite an
overkill for getting a binary from a project which purports cross-platform
targets.

I see this quite often: in the *nix world, we tend to forget that our lowly
win32 brothers generally don't have build systems on their machines -- and
if they do, they are probably Visual Studio build systems. As cross-platform
devs, we (and I include myself here, because I've had to do the same) need
to learn that some target platforms are just not candidates for source
releases.

I guess what I'm drilling on about in such length is that Tomboy is a great
app with great x-platform usage. Pity that it's really only available for
*nix users, since the win32 build is well outdated and buggy. I don't see
the point in choosing a heavier platform with known overheads beyond that of
native C/C++ if no-one takes advantage of the greatest benefit of the
platform: releases for all OSs where the platform is supported.
So I guess what I'm saying is that if the Tomboy devs can't be bothered to
make win32 binary releases on a regular basis (and will rather tell people
to compile it themselves:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631286#c6), then perhaps the devs
need to re-evaluate their end-goals. Is this to be a x-platform note-taker
with sync abilities or not? I *truly* hope it is because there's no project
that I've tried out there which comes even close.


-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own
skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids
clever tricks like the plague.
- Djikstra.
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