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Comment by JorgeGT | Hacker News Reader

> It's cross platform

Are there Windows builds? There was a guy that did but he stopped at 2.0.

There's been renewed work on a clean Windows port in recent months: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327

Interesting! They almost lynched the guy at the beginning but seems that there's progress.

Wow you weren't kidding.

> It may be better to go help out some other free software project that already had the misfortune of working on that platform...

I understand their points about maintenance, but telling someone to go work on something else rather than keeping an experimental branch around, sheesh.

As someone who appreciates open source and works primarily on Windows I really wish they had a better attitude. Take a look at Rust or Elixir, fantastic communities and the software is better for it. I'm sure that Darktable has some interesting things but based on what I saw in that thread I think I'll be sticking to Lightroom.

I've only read that quote, but to me that doesn't seem like a rude thing to say. I interpret it as "This windows branch is awful, it might be better for you to abandon that effort and work on something with more potential". I hear it as criticizing the code, not the person.

Edit: I read a little more, looks like the devs were upset because windows isn't a free platform, and they didn't want darktable's reputation marred by a buggy port.

> This will be very bad for darktable reputation

It was in the context of building trust, basically "go away and work on another project so we know who you are before you can touch our holy code".

That guy came in with a great attitude and approach, he pretty much got told to pack it.

It's an unfortunate situation, but the way _they_ put it (two sides to every fight) is that they don't know if he'll drop out in a week and all those who downloaded it will come screaming "Were's our updates!!"

I dont believe in being rude to people, but sometimes you have to make things clear. In their comment chain they asked the dev to rename the application so it didn't give the reputation a bad name. I can understand that, especially since Darktable apparently is a really good app. Open source means you can take the code and build/modify/play with it, it doesn't mean you can take the name and reputation of a product and apply it in a new direction (using the same name).

So the guy forks darktable for windows, calls it something else. Then when the project reaches a level of maturity the original devs approve of, they take his work back into darktable, produce their own windows port under their 'brand' and his project potentially dies because it doesn't carry the same weight?

I got the vibe from some of the comments that "one guy working on a windows port isn't enough, we don't want to help support it so we're going to discourage any 'one man bands' until a team appears from nowhere to do all the work" is the common view, which I sort of understand that they don't want to have to provide end user support to a platform they themselves don't use, but that attitude might ultimately go against the project.

Exactly! Thanks for summarizing much better than I could.

You can set out requirements for merging upstream while also encouraging users to contribute. They're driving off good developers who do use windows primarily and might want to contribute. Like you said, there's no "team" that's going to materialize if that's the approach that they take whenever anyone brings it up.

I dont see anything wrong with what you just described.

    * Yes it's ok for the *owners* of the project to reject buggy code.
    * Yes it's ok for the owners of the project to accept working code.
    * Yes it's ok for the owners to "take" someones work when said person volunteered to it. 
    Thats what "contributing to open source" means.
    * Yes it's ok for the owners to use a working contribution to better their project for each and 
    every one of the users.
    * Yes its ok for someones fork to die.  Thats the fork maintainer's problem. 
    Is there anything preventing him from checking out the latest version of the code (serious question, 
    I dont know), the one that the owners incorporated and improved ?

Also, it's not "his" (the windows dev's) project. It's his contribution, which is to port the original owners' project to windows.

I dont see anything wrong here, other than the owners weren't exactly welcoming, encouraging, or perhaps helpful. That sucks, sounds like they were rude (or perhaps they turned rude when the original "dont call this fork Darktable, please" didn't get heeded ?).

What a shame, I've heard similar stories about people who try to contribute to open source and get treated badly. But again, other than being crass, I dont see any problem. It's great that windows dev contributed so much and improved. He deserves a big Thank You from everyone, especially the owners (and maybe they did ?). But the bottom line is he volunteered. He isn't owed anything.

It is very interesting. I don't want to intrude on their thread, but if others here vouch for this technique I'll politely ask them to look into the following:

- https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...

- http://boot2docker.io/

...has anyone here ever used this approach with nix apps that need to run on Windows "natively"? Writing a powershell script to silently install boot2docker with this special docker image wouldn't be too difficult. The DarkTable folks don't seem interesting in maintaining Win builds so this may be the perfect workaround.

NOTE: I realize that `File > Open Image` may be non-trivial, but surely there's a way to mount a host<->guest folder (e.g.: When using the application, the workspace is located in `C:\Users\$whoami\Documents\DarkTable\.jpg`)

Boot2Docker is not for this purpose. Silently installing a VM on a Windows PC is a very bad idea. If the user is not proficient enough to know about and configure the VM, then what happens if

- B2D installs a Virtualbox instance, but Hyper-V is on. VBox can't run besides Hyper-V.

- How do you configure the resource usage for the VM?Something like Darktable requires a lot of resources

- How do you manage shared folders? VBox shared folder performance is really bad compared to native

- Do you install an X server as well?

Anyway -- it's just a bad idea.

Thanks sz4kerto. I'm glad I got some thoughts here before posting that in their PR (I obviously won't post it now because of the points you brought up).

I guess a user that would be comfortable with b2d or vbox would just have those running anyways!

Note: for you question about X, please check out https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...

Oops! You're right there's no official Windows port. I've run it on Mac and Linux only.

I've been able to run it on the Linux Subsystem for Windows with an X server, but there was still a few quirks I believe.

It works in Windows 10 using the Linux for Windows feature, and then using a suitable windows X server.

http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png

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