gregoa's blog: should I feel dirty now?

gregoa's blog
random musings about computers, life, and everything

2013-06-15 02:01:54 +0200

I've set up a windows machine yesterday (& today since this takes so long). on my own old laptop. at home. & it's running in my apartment.

feels strange after living in windows-free apartments for quite some years. & I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

the purpose of resurrecting my old laptop is to run a CPAN smoke tester. there are constant complaints in the perl community about the low amount of test reports from windows installations (& for older distributions, so I'm running CPAN::Reporter::Smoker with 'reverse' => 1, at least once).

for the time being, I'm using non-free software to improve free software. – let's see how this develops …

ps: I'm also running a CPAN smoke tester on my raspberry pi (under raspbian with a perlbrewed perl) since a few days. it's a bit slow but well :)

permalink | tags: computer, planetdebian | 6 comments

comments on this entry

Jorge Castillo Submitted at 02:06:24 on 15 June 2013 (UTC)
This is somewhat off topic but I feel angry (sort of) when I have to use Windows, ever since I had to learn VB6 in high school (I didn't, I failed that course). It's not because I dislike proprietary software, I use whatever software I like & can afford, after OpenBSD my favorite OS is OS X. I just dislike Microsoft because I've been forced to use their subpar technology all my life.
natxo Submitted at 15:02:12 on 15 June 2013 (UTC)
It's just an OS, and it gets stuff done for a lot of people. I recently installed it for my kids because of all kinds of stuff they need for school. It is not their fault that their school requires that system, and the discussion about that choice with the school staff is pointless, they would not understand why free software is important because it is not for them. It is just necessary stuff they need. I for one thank you for improving the Perl experience for those poor souls ;-) (I use quite a bit of Perl myself under Windows at work, so I know what I talk about).
terceiro Submitted at 17:19:33 on 15 June 2013 (UTC)
shouldn't the people who actually use Perl on Windows be the ones running smoke testers on WIndows? :-) If the prople who this is important for don't care enough to do it, why should you?
gregoa Submitted at 22:16:13 on 15 June 2013 (UTC)
I care about it because I want to help the CPAN module authors who want to have their software working on all platforms. - just like I also care about my Debian packages building on architectures I have no clue about :)
Petter Reinholdtsen Submitted at 06:54:32 on 16 June 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps you can use http://reactos.org/ to test on Windows without having to accept the horrible Microsoft license and feel dirty afterwards.
Andreas Tille Submitted at 09:27:31 on 17 June 2013 (UTC)
+1 to Petter While this might turn out rather to be a test of reactos than testing CPAN I'd think it really also makes some sense to have some production use of reactos than accepting a dirty license.

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