[Interest] Oops! Somebody's got a bad case of dependency bloat!

[Thiago Macieira]

On quarta-feira, 10 de abril de 2013 14.19.58, Michael Jackson wrote:
> <rant>
>  Hey Thiago,
>    Nothing personal here but leave your *personal* feelings out of the
> development environment. Yes we all have our favorites and we all have ones
> we don't like but at least *respect* the idea that Qt is developed on ALL
> of them and that EQUAL attention should be given to all the platforms. I
> suggest you fire up a Windows machine, make yourself a "normal" user, don't
> give yourself access to anywhere OTHER than your home directory and bring
> up a development system. You will then see why some of us complain about
> having to jump through hoops that NEVER should have been in there to begin
> with. Oh yeah, and they don't have access to places like gitorious or
> bitbucket because their firewalls stop it cold.</rant>

Hi Mike

I respect your opinion and I understand your concerns. After reading some of 
the replies, I begin to understand some of the challenges. Especially the one 
about the licensing of ActivePerl.

But note what I said is not exactly a personal feeling. It's the conclusion of 
a software professional with 7 years of experience doing cross-platform 
development. And this professional's opinion is that Windows is *not* a 
welcoming operating system for developing, not when standard tools that we 
take for granted on other OS are missing.

No, we tolerate Windows and put up with its quirks. You can say that 
"tolerate" and "put up with" are personal opinions. A more professional way of 
saying it would be: Windows remains a very important operating system for us, 
but due to limited manpower available, there's only so much we can do to 
support the extreme differences between it and all the other OS (they're all 
UNIX). We'd rather spend the manpower in higher-priority tasks.

I also call into question giving a developer such a locked down system. If an 
employee needs a given tool to accomplish a job, give it to them. Don't make 
the employee work around the issue and waste their time.

What you said about Gitorious and other Git repositories reminds me of a 
developer who needed that for his *job* and their IT people would not / could 
not provide a solution. Why should the Qt Project create workarounds? Who's 
going to pay for the sysadmin time spent on setting up the solution, 
monitoring it, and for the static IP assigned to that one use? Give the 
employees the tools and means that they need to accomplish their jobs 
effectively. IT is there to help, not hinder.

>  Is it possible to have an alternate set of source downloads that have this
>  step already performed. Keep in off the main page if you want to and just
>  post to the list where they are located so that we are the only ones
>  downloading these "bloated" versions. I do not care how small the download
>  is if I can not compile Qt it does not help.

Anyone can do that. We'll be happy to link to them, just as we probably will 
for the MinGW packages built by third-parties.

Will you trust those sources, since they are *clearly* modified?
-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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