Re: flexfax: Hylafax future

[David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>]

> 3)A port to NT - Recently cygnus have released some librarys to make NT

The Cygnus libraries are going commercial, so you won't get a free port
this way.

> machine look like a unix machine, i imagine this would greatly speed up a
> port of the code

Going to NT would significantly increase the support load.  One of the main
reasons for going to NT seems to be that people have been convinced that
they can get the power of Unix without the need to understand it (everything
is GUI) - actually the problem with NT is that you can't do everything with
the GUI and it is very difficult to find out how to go round it, and normally
requires much more complex programming than simple shell scripts.

Hylafax, in particular, represents all that the NT lovers hate in Unix:
lots of component programs with text files to configure them.  To really
reach the NT market (rather than people forced into NT, from Unix, by
management policy) you would have to create a complete GUI management and
configuration suite; in a lot of cases, that is all that Microsoft do -
e.g. Microsoft DNS appears to be a thin veneer of GUI, giving you
restricted access to the zone files in the standard BIND code.

You are not going to get away with issuing source patches (already a problem
with many Linux users++, but they do have the option and are more likely to
be motivated), and even lists of registry key changes will probably not be
taken well.

++ I'm a Linux user, but without a plug and play background.