Richmond goes data-mining . . .

[Richmond Mathewson]

  On 27/04/2010 22:28, J. Landman Gay wrote:
> Peter Alcibiades wrote:
>> Jacque, what about record sound and record video?  They're marked in my
>> dictionary as being Mac +Windows only.  I haven't tried to use either 
>> one.

Well, I wouldn't bother because if they are marked 'Mac +Windows only' 
they are probably not going to do you
much good under Linux.

Mac and Windows are like Communist states; centrally planned and 
controlled (and should we forget that we might
like to recall Mr Jobs' recent antics with Adobe) with all that entails; 
a certain even-ness of form and quality, but an
inability to do some individual, regional stuff.

Linux is rather like Germany in the early nineteenth century; a lot of 
city-states with a wide variety of political systems
but sharing a fairly closely related dialects. Great for growing your 
own, private political experimentation; but when
you export your bananas to the next-door statelet don't be entirely 
surprised if they fall foul of "decree Number 666 on
crooked bananas" that only holds sway in that statelet.

>
> Oh right, I forgot those too. Basically the browser, speech, and 
> recording features are all implemented as externals. Ditto dynamic 
> font loading. In Mac and Windows there are system-wide resources that 
> can be called on to implement these things. If Linux doesn't provide 
> that then it would likely be a lot of work to write each of them from 
> scratch. It's my guess that's the reason they aren't available on that 
> OS.
>

So; it would probably better in future, to prevent these "temper 
tantrums", general misunderstandings, and so forth
if anything that is implemented as an external was marked as so, so that 
folk who ran RunRev on a different platform to that
on which a certain external ran would be aware that it was an external 
and not what we might terms a "core feature" of
the IDE.

'Core Features' should be defined as those capabilities that functioned 
100% on all the OSes for which RunRev is
currently available (obviously, in the light of so many flavours of 
Linux there would have to be some sort of
rider referring to the flavours the Linux version was guaranteed for.

If this was sorted out developers would understand what was really meant 
by "cross-platform" and, should RunRev
not live up to their expectations / requirements shop elsewhere. 
Similarly, if developers wished to develop for
a subset of the platforms for which RunRev is offered they could check 
capabilities against a (three-column) list
to see which externals were available where.