On 30/12/2007, Steve VanSlyck s.vanslyck@spamcop.net wrote:
While I understand what you are saying, I do not understand the problem. Nearly every windows program out there is issued pre-compiled, and surely there are as many different windows hardware configs as there are unix.
Frequently the people who write the software won't have access to the commercial Microsoft compiling environment, and anyone with Cygwin could run ./configure;make;make install as easily as anyone on Unix. Windows is an utterly alien environment to the Unix way of doing things; supporting Unix open source software properly on Windows - as a reasonably bulletproof package - is something a project has to take on seriously to do well, and most just don't have the resources.
This sort of thing is why we have distributions who maintain dependency-resolving repositories ... and why the usual answer to "you don't have x in your repository!" is likely to be "here are the steps to become a maintainer."
- d.