[Gambas-user] Gambas Future or what kind of Gambas we want.

[Rob Kudla]

On 01/24/2014 02:03 PM, martin p cristia wrote:
> So Gambas is not THAT easy to install or compile? Well, we're 
> programmers, lets show some effort... Linux hard to install? Ubuntu
> sets a computer up in 20m, and if its a

If they're running Ubuntu, it's just a matter of a few clicks to install
Gambas through the software center. If they're trying to compile the whole
thing from source and are having difficulty, they probably don't need to be
compiling from source anyway. Just because you CAN do something under Linux
that you can't do under Windows doesn't mean that you have to do it.

Packages made with Gambas should automatically have the right dependencies
and the required packages should be pulled in during installation.

I just don't see this as a big issue. Ubuntu, Debian, Suse and Fedora all
include Gambas as part of their package management systems. Those four and
their derivatives cover easily 90% of all desktop Linux users. Yes, there
will be issues with architectures not typical of desktop computers, like
MIPS or ARM. Those aren't officially supported, and it's up to users with
those platforms to get Gambas working on them if the packages automatically
generated by Debian (etc.) don't work.

If you really think Windows development tools are better in that regard,
try getting VB6 running on PowerPC, which was officially supported by
Windows during VB6's lifetime. It never happened. If you google "visual
basic" "powerpc", the fourth hit is actually a Gambas package which runs on
PPC. Today you can make VB.NET apps that run on Windows RT (ARM
architecture) if for some reason you actually wanted to, but I'm also
guessing that never happens with most VB.NET apps because no one really
cares about Windows on ARM except Microsoft.

And even that's a huge step up from the previous second-class Windows port,
WinCE for ARM and MIPS, used up until about a year or two ago on $99
laptops that were punishing to use. I've heard you could write your VB apps
in a certain way and cross-compile them to run under WinCE, but I've never
seen an app built that way.

Gambas programs, on the other hand, will work on any flavor of Linux once
the Gambas interpreter is fully ported. They aren't officially supported,
and on many platforms where the Linux kernel is supported, Gambas will
never work because they're embedded devices without X or (in the case of
Android) even glibc. But the wonder of free software is that anyone can
take the source and make the port if they put enough effort into it. You
can't do that with most Microsoft tools.

> decent one, the only thing you need to know is your time zone.
> Otherwise it is all answered in Askubuntu.

Unfortunately, with laptops (which are most of the PCs sold today), that
isn't always the case. For example, my new Lenovo Ideapad has function keys
that don't even generate keycodes unless you press the Fn button with them;
on their own they do things like adjust volume and brightness. And there's
no SysRq key so no magic key combinations, no NumLock key so there's no
mouse accessibility for when its touchpad goes haywire which is about a
dozen times a day, and the ATI graphic driver has a memory leak resulting
in the X server swapping constantly after about a day, and trying to revert
to the free driver causes the updater to crash in 13.10, and not a single
one of these issues has a solution on AskUbuntu, though several have been
asked and left unanswered. (Don't buy a Lenovo Ideapad.)

Of course, in my Windows days there were many, many issues that couldn't be
solved in online forums, since you had the source to almost nothing and bug
fixes were driven by PR, not technical merit or even, in those days, security.

>From time to time, someone chimes in with "We need to make it as easy to
develop and distribute Gambas apps as it was to develop VB apps", but the
truth is, Gambas is already far more flexible and easy to distribute apps
in than VB6 ever was. You just have to let go of leftover Windows notions
like "setup.exe is the pinnacle of package management" or "applications are
best distributed in one big file containing all the dependencies statically
linked" or "it's up to the compiler's author to port to my non-standard
architecture", because none of those are true.

Rob