Jean-Marc Lasgouttes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >>> Don't create a new README.Win32. Just overwrite the >>> existing one! Scons is so easy to use. Nobody will >>> like my old instructions anymore
> Angus> Keep both. It's great to have competition > Angus> (MinGW/MSVC) > I am not sure why you are all harping on that. > Competition is not great. Diversity is. Two old codgers, rumminating on the meaning of life? I find myself agreeing with you entirely. I even meant what you wrote ;-) Maybe I should post to the list through a WYRIWIM filter so that What You Read Is What I Mean? Your analogy with Anglo-style obsession with markets (and their artificial and arbitrary rules) is not the one I'd draw on myself. I'd prefer to use a Darwinian analogy. Here's my take on it: I'm interested in Bo's scons work because experience shows that getting the autotools to do what we'd like on Windows has required us (well, you actually) to jump through a number of hoops. Autotools and Windows don't fit very well together. I'm interested in autotools because the "just work" on *nix machines. So, you see I am definitely a proponent of diversity. However, diversity is a by-product of evolution and I see that scons evolves. This evolution is occurring both in the LyX repository as Bo improves his scripts and in the Scons repository as its devs implement further functionality. I'm unsure how rapidly the autotools are evolving. Diversity isn't the only visible result of evolution, however. Extinction is another. Sometimes one creature fills a niche better than an other, is more successful and drives the less successful creature out. I'm an outside observer of the evolutionary processes occurring within the LyX development world. It will be interesting to see if the LyX scons scripts improve to handle everything that LyX does with the autotools. At the moment it looks like scons handles the basic build but doesn't yet handle the dist targets. From what I read, it seems like support for these targets will be improved by the scons developers themselves, so LyX may well just get it for free. I don't think we can predict just where all this is taking us, but all three possible results appear equally plausible at the moment: * scons support dies; Bo, Abdel and Peter are relatively new to the LyX game; perhaps they'll get bored and move on. * scons and autotools co-exist. Each offers functionality that the other lacks. * autotools support dies. Scons support evolves to cover all use cases and the LyX devs decide that maintaining the old build system is a waste of resources. > As you can see, competition is not always progress. > But cooperation is. Evolution is naturally selfish. Game Theory would suggest that cooperation has to be of benefit to both participants. Of course, rules might be introduced to the game that make cooperation more attractive, but that may be analogous to the skewing of the market that you complain about in your 118 118 story. FWIW, we have just gone through exactly this 12 (in our case 192) to 118XYZprocess. I find it confusing also. Angus
