I've never worked in a place were there was the smallest
chance one of my Perl programs needed to be ported to
Windows or any other non-Unix platform.
However, I've written large shell scripts on Solaris that
needed to be ported to both Windows NT and to HP-UX. The
port to Windows was *trivial*. One directory needed to be
renamed, and we installed a Unix tools package on Windows
(I think it was MKS). Porting to HP-UX was actually more
work.
Generally, I don't give a rats ass whether my programs can be
easily ported to Windows or not. If you want to cripple yourself
running on that platform, be my guest. Don't expect any pity
or help from me.
I'm a toolsmith. I write tools, usually highly specialized
tools. Needing to do one particular job, on a particular
platform. Portability to non-Unix platforms usually is a
non-issue. Besides, there are Unix toolkits for non-Unix
systems available. Install them, and your platform will become
better.
Abigail |