[flac-dev] Fwd: flac 1.3.0pre1 prelease

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Christoph Terasa wrote:

> When you say "FOSS/libre" you mean "GNU/Linux"?

No specifically I mean Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, any other *BSD
as well as things like Haiku.

> I can imagine FOSS 
> environments which don't rely on the GNU build system.

I can imagine them too, but I actually cannot name any. If you know of
any I'd love to be enlightened.

> Also isn't making 
> FLAC build equally nice and easy on all target platforms a worthwhile 
> aim?

FLAC is FOSS/libre and FOSS/libre will always be best supported, mainly
because I can download the OS for free (as in no money) and install it
in a free VM (like kvm or Qemu).

As soon as its a "you have to pay us money" OS, its immediately harder
for me to support.

> This will make contributions from Mac OS or Windows users more 
> likely, ultimately improving the project as a whole (e.g. the windows 
> Unicode issue).

Well first off, lets be honest. Supporting Mac is trivially easy in
comparison to support Windows. From the point of view of a library
and command line program like flac, Mac is pretty much POSIX compliant.
The Mac command line tools are not totally compatible with the GNU
versions but there's usually a work around. For example this patch:

    https://git.xiph.org/?p=flac.git;a=commit;h=0432b9649071814ee462743528ad4f2bcc68408c

As maintainer of FLAC, I have never rejected any sane patch from
a Windows or Mac developer. I will push back until the patch is
right (as I am currently doing with Ben Allison's MSVC patches)
but that makes the code better and should eventually get the code
into flac.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/