Interested in finding platform-specific bugs in your software? Let a class of students who mostly use Windows (don't ask me why) try setting things up and running your tests. I promise you won't get through unscathed. Every project. Every time.
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Come over to the east coast and you'll find that there's more Windows than Mac. And yes that makes open source work harder, especially when teaching.
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Less tongue in cheek: People seem to think that contributors "naturally" use Macs, and therefore we don't need to worry too much about the Windows contribs (who, they think, don't exist). In reality, prospective Windows contributors are bouncing off the process every day.
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If we want to be more accessible to Windows devs where do we start? Are there any assumptions reasonable to make about their systems and if so, which? (Powershell? Linux on Windows? Cygwin? Do they have Git? A working C compiler? SSH client?)
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I think Powershell is a good assumption. Powershell w/ admin is worth pushing people to as a performance optimization (as baseline, copy files, but print a message telling people perf will be better with admin, and use symlinks in admin)
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I think it's safe to ask people to download git (MSVC installers provide it, last I checked). Support chocolatey if you can.
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Microsoft's OSS projects like
@code and@typescriptlang are great places to look for best practices. The devs who work on those projects are super-friendly and will help you out. -
/cc
@auchenberg and@drosenwasser are great! -
SSH comes with the very latest Windows (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/microsoft-quietly-snuck-an-ssh-client-and-server-into-the-latest-windows-10/ …) but I'd only depend on the user installing ssh if you want the user to use ssh directly. Otherwise, libssh is better.
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