Are there Windows users of cons?

[Zachary Deretsky]

A year ago I had to choose a tool for a large build system, which would work
the same way on Windows and on Unix. I chose cons over jam because using MD5
checksums versus timestamps was very appealing and because of Greg Spencer's
extensions, which integrate cons with Windows IDE and which, I had hoped,
would be supported in the upcoming releases of cons.


Apparently, I made a wrong choice.

During the last YEAR there has been ZERO Windows support for cons.
Nothing was done in this area, and this is in the open source development
which prides itself on fast response.

Greg's changes are still not supported. Temporary files for long link
commands without which linking does not work on Windows are not there. Fix
for the cons bug related to the timestamps set by MS Visulal Studio, which
Tony Koralik posted a year ago is not there.

It took me and it would take others (again!) a big effort to research those
bugs. Debugging a large system written in perl is a full-time job.

The required changes are minimal and they do not affect existing
funcionality.
It is really not more than one day's work unless there is religion involved.

There is a clear message from the cons maintainers:
"WINDOWS USERS GET LOST!"

I am writing this as a last-ditch effort to reverse this attitude and to
save my one year investment in cons.

Are there other Windows users of cons?

Please respond to this message and request speedy incorporation of existing
Windows-related fixes into the current code plus real-time Windows support
in the future.

Thanks, Zach.