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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Replying to @humphd
Windows is all too often an afterthought in the open source world, but an enormous number of people in the world use it primarily or even exclusively. I’ve found simply announcing I *care* about the Windows experience brings grateful devs out of the woodwork.
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Replying to @littlecalculist
'The inverse between "people using computers mostly use Windows" and "developers mostly don't use Windows" is amazing, yes' --the man typing on his Mac... Caring about Windows is a proxy for caring about people who do things differently than you. It's a great practice.
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Replying to @humphd
I’m not even sure it’s true that developers use mostly non-Windows. I wonder what the percentages look like eg amongst programmers in developing countries.
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Replying to @littlecalculist @humphd
it’s 50/50 chance from my experience, which is why i take nothing for granted… and use path.join() in nodejs
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path.join() is a good start (probably hits ~50% of the bugs I see in the real world). More pernicious stuff is stuff like: people assuming where.exe is the same as which (TLDR where returns multiple entries *if* there is more than one).
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Replying to @wycats @jasonmulligan and
Also the widespread belief that / works on Windows (TLDR nope; verbatim paths starting with \\?\ don't support / and are used a lot to work around max path length limitations)
2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
Also the widespread belief that symlinks don't work on Windows so you don't need to bother supporting it (TLDR nope they work on Windows for a lot of people and you should use a symlink-or-copy abstraction anyway)
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