How to be an Awesome Open Source Developer
I’m a big fan of open source. Capitalism is awesome, but it inspires and encourages greed, so it’s nice to see somebody defying that system by working hard at something, and then giving it away for free.
Of course, you’re at the mercy of whatever kind of limping scrod they shove out their codehole, but hey, it’s free!
Quite often, their stuff sucks, or they don’t maintain it, or it doesn’t compile, or it doesn’t work, or it only works in certain environments, or whatever. But every so often, you find that one nugget of well-maintained and well-written rad that makes you love America! Or in this case, it makes you love the Netherlands.
I was following up on on this post and trying to compile the PECL translit extension on 64-bit Windows. Obviously, I was destined to fail. And fail I did. So then I emailed the author of the extension with a cry for help:
I was curious if the translit extension is available for Windows. I noticed there was no configuration file for it, so I attempted to hack together a config.w32 and build it but didn’t have much luck. Is it conceivable that this extension is buildable on Windows?
I’m trying to build it for PHP 5.3 on x64, which probably isn’t helping my chances…
Anyway, the documentation I found didn’t mention if it was even viable on PHP 5.3, so I could be barking up a dead tree. For the record, the error was pretty immediate and looked like this:
C:\code\php64\php-5.3.1\ext\translit\data\compact_underscores.c : fatal error C1083: Cannot open compiler generated file: ‘x64\Release_TS\ext\translit\data/compact_underscores.obj’: No such file or directory
Thanks,
Tommy
I didn’t really expect anything back for a while. I know he’s a busy guy, and there hadn’t really been any updates to this extension for a couple years, but I figured I’d give it a shot. In 3.5 hours, I had a reply that said, basically, “I’m not sure if it works on Windows, but you can pull the latest from SVN to make it build. I just built it on 64-bit Windows but I haven’t tested them.” And then he freaking attached the compiled DLLs. Both thread-safe and non-thread-safe versions. Seriously. Here’s proof:
That’s dedication to maintaining your project. Not only did he answer my question, but he went the extra mile of verifying that it was a solution himself.
Derick Rethans, you are rad. There needs to be more open source developers like you.
PS: I checked out the latest version of translit from the SVN repository he specified and rebuilt, and it totally worked.
February 22, 2010
Posted in: php, windows
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