schlitt.info - php, photography and private stuff
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- Revision 1
- by Tobias Schlitt
- Wed, 19 Nov 2008
- 23:29:46 +0100
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Back to Windows...
Today I needed to start up my VMWare to test some PHP stuff on a Windows XP installation. I was quite curious, how I would perform after more than 4 years completly without Windows. Here are my experiences...
The first thing I wanted to do was setting up PHP. After a glance of "emerge dev-lang/php" I decided to download XAMPP and install the all in one package. So far so good, PHP seemed to be running after not much hassle, although I first needed to figure out the website of XAMPP (it is here, if you are ever searching), then downlod the installer and run it manually. Anyway, it gave me a lot of extra stuff and in fact installed a complete web develompment environment for me.
Good, so I wanted to checkout eZ Components from SVN. I remebered how to open a (what they call) "console" using "Start" -> "Run" -> "cmd.exe" and typed "cd De<tab>". Wow, that even worked! I'm amazed. But that only for a few milliseconds, because "svn co http://svn.ez.no/svn/ezcomponents/trunk" produced a nice error message. So - after downloading SVN manually from the web, installing it and adding its binary to the PATH variable (thank god, someone in the office knew how to do this) - this worked, too. Setting up the eZ Components environment was as easy as on Linux, since we provide a script called "setup-env.bat", which handles that job for you.
I tried out running some of our test suites, which also worked fine and turned to debug the things I neede to debug... "vim ConsoleT<tab>/s<tab>" *gnarf``*``, the auto completion "feature" of the "console" only works with backslashes. Again... "vim ConsoleT<tab>s<tab>"... gives "vim ConsoleTools.svn"... *argh``*``. Whatever, when I finally had the correct path to the file I wanted to edit, I realized: There is no VI on Windows... Ok, so I downloaded GVIM for Windows and started editing and fixing.
Great, after some messing around with newlines on Windows, stuff worked as expected. "svn diff" produced a nice patch, which I could finally copy from VMWare to Linux again. Over there I noticed that I broke something and fixed that again. Another patch, copy to Windows "patch -p0 < patch.txt"... runs into an error... *grrr``*`` So, I downloaded the patch binary, installed it and... ran into some weird error. Thank god I only changed 1 file and so decided to copy this one manually.
That's only a short abstract of my day with MS Windows XP and my personal result from this is: My finger hurts from all those mouse moving and clicking, my eyes hurt a bit from all those jumping windows and popup stuff, my blood presure is on about 180 because of the piece of shit what they call a console, I lost about 1 hour to search for software on the web and I was 3 times close to throwing my notebook out of the window...
My conclusion (again): Windows? No thanks!
Note: Some of the mentioned stuff definitly results from me not being used to that $%&!?§ anymore, anyway, I think it sucks...
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Mike Thorn
That 'piece of shit' console is easily replaceable via cygwin with something you'll be more than comfortable with. Windows has better cvs/svn clients than mac or linux have currently (I'm thinking wincvs and tortoise cvs/svn).
Link to commentIt's a pretty darn nice os for developing php really. I would never run it as a server, but I sure as hell prefer it for my development workstation. It works, it stays out of my way, and the dev tools on it rock. Komodo Edit + pgadmin3 + tortoise svn make for a very rapid development for me. Struggling on linux between psql (couldn't get pgadmin to compile on several distros) while juggling multiple vi windows after giving up on trying to make the gedit/kate fonts suck less was just too much of a hassle.HK
Toby
If you install Cygwin, you could also simply install a Unix! :) Beside that, I like the original SVN client most, its usage is so much faster than the using any kind of GUI.
Link to commentDaniel
I noticed that people working with linux have basic problems on Windows and vice versa.
Link to commentInstalling php + apache from setup.exe instead of XAMPP usually takes me about 5min.
For SVN only tortoise. The best I worked with.
And of course Zend Studio as an IDE.
Btw: you lost 1hour for searching?!? Do you know that there is a google? Searching for the above shouldn't take more than 5-8min, no fence.
Regards,
Daniel
Toby
I admit, 1 hr was a bit overdriven... ;)
Link to commentBjörn D
After reading this I thought my MS stocks would fall... but they didn't... i guess they still do good soild business.
Link to commentI like both linux and windows.
gggeek
Most of the devs hanging around here would have a [much] harder time figuring out how to set up a working environment under ubuntu, not to talk about 'exotic' distros such as slack.
Link to commentAnd no, I do not mean "open synaptic and fetch the complete stuff", I mean 'get apache, php and db of choice recompiled using all the extensions we will be using in production, but no more': at least under windoze the php extensions are enabled/disabled by default via single line php.ini editing, whereas on linux using enable-all=shared is not the best documented option.
BTW: win sw I find invaluable:
- scite text editor - as fast as notepad to start, but with all the coding goodness you need
- total commander - best sw ever
- unxutils - for running make, fgrep etc without having to install the complete cygwin monster
Pavel
I really tried to migrate to Linux but the only thing I'm completely missing in Linux console is tortoise svn checkin GUI where one is able to see diffs and revert. It also spellchecks log message and has very nice autocomplete(it parses changed files and autocompletes class names, methods, file names etc).
Link to commentIf only there was such a ncurses tool for Linux...
Thierry B.
Personaly coming from Windows and not being a shell fan, I succeeded to become almost as easy as I was with TortoiseCVS / Winmerge using Cervisia / Kompare.
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