[Xapian-devel] Optimized VSEncoding

[Olly Betts]

Sorry for the late reply, I missed this in my mailbox.

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 09:03:00AM +0800, Hurricane Tong wrote:
> >>We also recommend using Linux for development work rather than
> >>Windows.
> 
> I have a ubuntu installed in my machine, but in ubuntu, my machine
> cannot awake from hiberating, sleeping....  I tried many methods but
> finally failed, so if not necessary, I don't switch to ubuntu.

The main issues are:

 * none of the active developers use Windows for development, so it's
   hard for us to support you if hit problems

 * the standard build system should work with cygwin or mingw+msys
   but as far as I know nobody's tried to get it to work with MSVC
   (it should be possible, just nobody has tried it and made the
   tweaks which are probably required)

 * the MSVC makefiles haven't been actively maintained for some time,
   and so don't work out of the box for trunk (and nmake is rather
   unlike most other make programs)

 * you need to take care not to create new text files with DOS line
   endings, and not to introduce them into existing files

 * you need to take care not to rely on MSVC-specific extensions to
   C++ (for example, I had to make a few changes to get your VSEncoding
   code to build on Linux)

We've had a GSoC student using Windows for development in a previous
year, and such issues did waste a lot of time.

Suspend and hibernate generally just work with modern Linux, but they
are not the easiest thing to debug if they don't.  I'd probably just
recommend using Linux in a VM if you have sufficient RAM to run both at
once.  Failing that, cygwin or mingw+msys are a better option than
MSVC.

Cheers,
    Olly