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.
-
-
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.
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes -
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.
3 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @littlecalculist @humphd
You can imagine that maybe there aren't a lot of windows contributors to OSS projects because it literally doesn't work and not because the pool of developers naturally gravitates towards OSX. Could be. Possibly. Who knows?
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
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.
2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
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.
3 replies 5 retweets 13 likes -
Replying to @wycats @davemethvin and
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?)
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @zofrex @davemethvin and
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)
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
I think it's safe to ask people to download git (MSVC installers provide it, last I checked). Support chocolatey if you can.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
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.1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
-
-
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.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Even for git, cargo uses libgit2 so that users who aren't trying to use Git directly can still get the Cargo registry and get bleeding-edge packages from github. I think this is a good practice.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes - 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.