Re: PDF Links in Windows

[David Kastrup]

Simon Albrecht <address@hidden> writes:

> On 28.09.2015 00:21, Thomas WillNot wrote:
>> There are lots of Windows users out there in the world! (Though I'd be
>> interested to know which percentage of LilyPonders are!)
>
> A small one, I’d estimate below 20%.

Frankly, I don't.  I think most of the heavy hitters in our quality
assurance and release building department use Ubuntu VMs on Windows
machines and privately mostly work with LilyPond using Windows.

In a similar vein, several power users/developers appear to have started
using the LilyDev VM or others mainly in order to be able to better
participate in LilyPond development and testing.

> As for myself, my LilyPond experience actually formed a major part of
> the motivation to switch to Ubuntu (along with Windows XP running out
> of support, and a virus already going berserk).

LilyPond definitely appears to be a gatekeeper drug, exactly _because_
we provide up to date Windows versions without having to rely on someone
natively keeping them in shape.

If you take a look at how much of an upstream battle it is for other
applications (like Git) which are rooted in the POSIX toolchain to
provide somewhat current Windows installations, and how much of an
impact that has made for the overall viability of Git (basically, it
took second place to Mercurial and Bazaar for a long time when
cross-platform deployment was wanted, until somebody who does not even
want to work with Windows took a whole lot of work and continues doing
so for keeping Git working under Windows), one really has to wonder how
much better GNU/Linux might be doing and how much developer time would
be freed if more applications rooted in the POSIX toolchain could sport
"Windows packages just fall out of a tree" setups.

For our ongoing work, providing Windows executables definitely seems to
be a net win in developers without having to dilute them across multiple
platforms.

-- 
David Kastrup