Re: [aspell-devel] VC6 and BCB5.5 patches

[Jose Da Silva]

On Saturday 19 February 2005 05:35 am, Gary Setter wrote:
> Hi,
> I submitted the last patch that I know is needed to make aspell
> compile with VC6 and BCB5.5. This does not cover exporting symbol
> from a dll. Win32 does not support exporting all symbol. I look
> forward to the next snapshot or release.

So do I.  Man! you've been busy!  ;-)  You've probably overloaded the poor 
maintainer with all those bug reports.

> FYI, I received an e-mail asking about Ole support for libaspell.
> Since that is the first step toward .NET support, I would expect
> a lot of interest in that development. Is there interest here in
> Ole support?

This will sound like an OS religious war, but is the .NET license compatible 
with the GNU license?
Will the functionality seen by adding .NET stuff also translate into stuff 
seen on other platforms such as BSD, Sun, Linux, CE, embedded, etc?
AFAIK, Microsoft did expose the .NET for other OS operators to attempt using, 
but it was an initial attempt and I don't think neither Microsoft nor anyone 
else is really putting much effort in keeping the other OS versions of .NET 
up to date with the windows version of .NET.  Then there is also the issue 
concerning patents. Perhaps there are no patent concerns with .NET yet, but 
since from the Linux perspective, Linux would be following microsoft's lead 
on .NET here, so if microsoft decided to issue patented processes in .NET, 
would the linux users follow, or would the linux users end up with an 
incompatible (broken as advertised by Microsoft) version of Aspell?
When it comes to .NET, linux is a case of the tail attempting to wag the dog, 
so it would have little to no say in terms of updates or improvements which 
may get patented in future.
Today, many computers are running windows, but just reading www.slashdot.org 
today, there is a posting mentioning how cisco is moving a fair bit of stuff 
to linux as well.
Tomorrow, if you look at the progress of computing, you should see some of 
the portable computers... you've got palmtops and cellphones with the 
computing power of computers of 10 years ago.
I would prefer to take the ++ out of the C++, this would make the whole thing 
more available across more platforms and OSes, but this is a personal 
preference and I am not the maintainer.

Just my 2 cents.