On 30/12/2007, Steve VanSlyck <s.vanslyck(a)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.