Mark Waddingham wrote:
On 2016-06-30 21:25, Richard Gaskin wrote:
OS APIs change out from under the engine with expensive regularity,
and all the while, even as mobile enhancements would indeed be
valuable, there's a rather long list of other things we're asking them
to do as well.
Hmmmm, at the end of the day, supporting iOS is (I would say) a great
deal less work then attempting to support
all-kinds-of-linux-distribution-under-the-sun as is evident by the
unfortunate problems people have using LiveCode on many of the
distributions with low 'market share'.
Interesting. I hadn't thought about iOS there, but I suppose that's a
part of it, even if a small one. I was thinking more generally about
the evolution of OSes, such as Apple's moves from 68k to PPC, Classic to
OS X, PPC to Intel, Carbon to Cocoa, and 32-bit to 64-bit; and while
Microsoft generally provides unusually good backward compatibility, the
migration from MCI to the new media APIs has required some rework.
Each of the changes in OSes seem to be a reasonable move that improves
the user experience. But they do cost developers time and money to stay
on top of. So while it's easy for folks using LC to take for granted
that most things just continue to work year after year, behind the
scenes there's a good bit of effort going into it to make that happen.
For example, the amount of time we have spent on trying to work out why
the browser does not work on certain distributions probably exceeds the
amount of time we have spent updating to support new iOS SDKs in the
last six months - and it is still not resolved.
Indeed, which is one of the reasons I've been eager to see what we Linux
users in the community can do to minimize the impact of those things.
The diversity of Linux distros is a key part of its growth, but it's not
easy for any development team to support them all.
For example, I realize Steam is an unusually demanding app, but their
system requirements for Linux go so far as to specify only one distro,
and only one specific supported version of that distro.
LiveCode's needs are less severe than Steam's, but Linux is so diverse
it seems reasonable to expect some limitations with the scope of
official support from the core team for the many various distros.
Migrating some of that support overhead to the community seems
achievable, and useful for everyone in allowing the core team to stay
focused on things requiring their unique talents.
No one wants to see the team postpone critical work while addressing a
font rendering issue on Hanna Montana Linux. :)
http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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